THE SUPREMES' GUN RULING

Professor Glenn Reynolds reports:

But winning in the Supreme Court is just the beginning of the story. Even the biggest civil-rights victories have taken years to percolate through the lower courts, often in the face of foot-dragging or outright resistance from lower-court judges, states and municipalities.

Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but it took a decade or more of slogging to make its promise bear fruit - and even then Congress had to give things a boost by passing the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts.

By contrast, in the 1990s the Supreme Court decided a series of cases narrowing Congress' powers to regulate all sorts of things under the rubric of "interstate commerce." But there were no hordes of public-interest lawyers to pick up on those decisions and bring new cases in the lower courts.

Without that pressure, the lower courts were free to ignore the Supreme Court's efforts to cut back on federal meddling - and that's what they did, to the point that some called it a "constitutional revolution where no one showed up."

Sound advice.