President Trump gets the opportunity to to nominate another pro-gun justice, this one in the 7th Circuit:
“Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced his retirement Friday afternoon … Posner is one of the most consequential legal figures of recent times, exerting significant influence on the practice and study of law from his perches on the Seventh Circuit and the University of Chicago Law School faculty … The Journal of Legal Studies says he was the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. Posner subscribes to a method of judging called “pragmatism,” which seeks to balance the equities of each case and conform judicial rulings to the social, political, and economic arrangements of the times …”
Posner was critical of Scalia:
“… Posner was also in the headlines in 2012 when then-Justice Antonin Scalia accused him of lying about the justice’s new book in a review published in The New Republic. In the review, Posner had accused Scalia of deviating from his own strict, text-based approach to interpreting law when he struck down a District of Columbia handgun ban in 2008 by considering the legislative history behind the law. Scalia responded to the review by saying, “To say that I used legislative history is simply, to put it bluntly, a lie.” …”
However, his “pragmatism” did extend to gun rights:
“… Posner’s opinon in the new case Moore v. Madigan … “To confine the right to be armed to the home is to divorce the Second Amendment from the right of self-defense described in Heller and McDonald. It is not a property right — a right to kill a houseguest who, in a fit of aesthetic fury, tries to slash your copy of Norman Rockwell’s painting, Santa with Elves.” …”