SCOTUS Gun Watch – Week of 6/8/20

It’s beginning to feel like déjà vu all over again. For the 5th time in a row, the Supreme Court has discussed the pending Second Amendment cert petitions at a conference and declined to act on them. I can’t quite figure out what might be happening, but I think we can break the possibilities down into several groupings:

1. Nothing special is happening. This isn’t unique to the Second Amendment cases. The Court also hasn’t yet issued many of the blockbuster decisions of the Term and hasn’t acted on many other high-profile cert petitions. We’re just being impatient.
2. The Court is preparing to GVR one of the lower court rulings—to reverse it without argument in a per curiam opinion. This is, in fact, what happened in the last Second Amendment case before NYSRPA, Caetano v. Massachusetts. The Court relisted Caetano for 10 conferences after its initial one before the Court issued the per curiam opinion.
3. The Court is going to deny one or more (up to, possibly, all) of the petitions and one or more justices are writing dissenting or separate opinions about the decision to deny cert. That would hold up the process.
4. The justices inclined to expand the right, and the justices inclined to restrict the right, are trying to strategically figure out the best case to convince Chief Justice Roberts to take their side. They may each be trying to persuade/feel him out before deciding which case or cases to vote to grant.

I have no idea which of these possibilities—or another one I have not thought of—is driving the relisting. It seems to me that possibilities (2) and (3) are less likely, but anything’s possible. Barring anything unusual, we won’t know which of these might be true until next Monday, June 15 at the earliest.