Socrates:
The reason I call it a "hidden history" is that the incorporation issue hasn't been widely discussed. The general public has no clue. There's a good reason for this: if people realized that states were claiming a right to violate the Bill Of Rights based on cases as bone-deep-ugly as Cruikshank, there'd have been riots long ago.
In other words, "the truth has been out there" but certainly not piped into people's homes on the evening news or even a PBS documentary...
Regarding Barron being a blooper from the get-go, we agree. But there's now a hell of a lot of case law back and forth either based on or caused by Barron, plus there's the 14th itself designed to overturn it. I don't see the clock getting reset back to 1833. But on page 2 in the 1833/Barron chapter I did mention this point.
Sidenote: in one of Amar's law review articles:
http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Amar1.html
...he goes into this in detail. Among other things he finds various judges post-1833 ignoring Barron and assuming that the BoR applies to the states.
Reforms from what? out of place maybe delete.
Well...it was meant as a bit of a teaser. This whole intro is meant to drag people into the main body of the thing. And maybe that's not the right idea...I'm thinking about that.
I'm wondering, in reading this, how many of these gun control laws haven't been challenged on the basis of race discrimination?
I've been arguing that for YEARS. Went so far as to try and recruit black or latino CCW discrimination suit challengers at local shooting ranges in California. Turns out everybody "black or brown" is seriously gun-shy about suing the local sheriff.
Is financial discrimination a basis to challenge a law, and, if so, when?
Been there, done that. Challenged CCW on exactly that basis in Federal district court, San Francisco. Was able to prove that CCW was being handled on racial lines, but as a white dude wasn't allowed to present the evidence. Was able to prove economic discrimination too but as that only gets you a "rational basis" analysis when we're dealing with something not a basic civil right, I was tossed out on my butt.
Heller of course changes all the rules. Now it IS a fundamental right, even in the 9th Circuit.
Computer question: Why can I move text from your document into another program, where, in the past, I've been unable to do this?
Because my text really is text, not graphics.
OK, a lot of .PDF files that look like "text" really aren't. They're scans of printed pages, so they're graphics. They look readable to our human eyeballs of course, but they're graphics.
My PDF text was typed in, not scanned in. So basic copy'n'paste-somewhere-else works fine. You can't edit my PDF unless you have specialized PDF editing software (Adobe Acrobat or others).
Sidenote: OpenOffice 3.x series (due out in a couple of months) will have built-in PDF editing capability, which will be way cool. As it is, when I had to edit PDFs I use a Linux program called "PDFEdit"...pretty basic but it works, esp. for copying pages from one PDF and interleaving them with another PDF file.