OK.
There are two different P&I arguments.
Let's take it from the top.
The 14A of 1868 (dates are important here, pay attention) says "no state shall abridge the privileges or immunities of US citizenship".
In 1870 this comes up at the US Supremes for the first time, in Ward v. Maryland. A guy name of Ward is a merchant from a Northern state (New Jersey I think) who wants to sell stuff in MD without paying that state's mandated extra taxes for out-of-state merchants. The court says basically "MD is wrong because this law impacts Mr. Ward's civil rights to both travel and engage in commerce - MD has to treat Ward equally with MD residents".
1872 the issue comes up again, in the Slaughter-house Cases which is basically about corruption: the city of New Orleans is promoting richer businesses over poorer ones (who have less of what we would today call "lobbying money" to kick around). An argument is made (which I'll get into later) for a
"broader reading of the PorI clause". It gets shot down. Citing Ward specifically, the Slaughter-House court says that the PorI clause of the 14th ONLY protects against cross-border discrimination.
1999: the US Supremes in Saenz v. Roe do another case very much like Ward and come to the same conclusion: the PorI clause of the 14th protects against cross-border discrimination - in this case, people coming to California are given less in welfare payments than a longer-term California resident.
So. What JimDandy is talking about is using the NARROW view of the PorI 14A clause to shoot down an aspect of cross-border discrimination. This is the same thing Gray Peterson is trying in the Colorado CCW discrimination case - CO will not recognize Gray's UT permit (even though they normally do!) because CO knows that Gray is a WA state resident and CO wants to punish WA state for not recognizing a CO permit. Yes, really. It's cross-border discrimination.
The Broader View Of The PorI Clause That Hasn't Worked Yet
Speedrrracer and Aguila Blanca are referring to a broader view of the PorI clause that Alan Gura tried to push for in the McDonald case. Under this view there's a LOT of "priviledges and immunities of US citizenship" that are supposed to get protected by the 14th Amendment. This view is found in several places...Justice Hugo Black spoke this way in his famous dissent in Adamson in 1947:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Adamson_v._California/Dissent_Black
Justice Clarence Thomas said the same thing in a concurring dissent in Saenz v. Roe:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=526&page=489
The best presentation for a broader reading of the 14A PorI clause is a book by Liberal-as-heck Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bill-Rights-Creation-Reconstruction/dp/0300082770
Amar makes the case that the primary author of the 14th (Ohio legislator John Bingham) was trying to overturn the Dred Scott case by using the language of that court (which ruled that racist laws were OK in the US, in 1856) by turning that court's language against them. This is one chunk of Dred Scott everybody points to who are on Hugo Black's side of this:
For if they [blacks, free or slave] were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=60&invol=393 - the case text shows that the main thrust of the decision of 1856 (that helped trigger the Civil War) was that racism was OK, not just slavery. And that in turn is why the 14th Amendment was needed post-Civil-War.
The Dred Scott case used the term "privileges or immunities of US citizenship" over 30 times while defining this as something blacks didn't have...the passage above is the most detailed. As Amar, Thomas and Black all argued, John Bingham was trying to overturn the Dred Scott decision by using their own term: "privileges and/or immunities of US citizenship".
In the years since the US Supreme Court has consistently pretended not to know what the phrase "privileges or immunities" as used in the 14A means...it is the worst, most blatant and by far the longest running fraud the US court system ever perpetrated.
Note that the civil rights listed in Dred Scott are not just what's found in the BoR: we also have a "right to free travel without pass or passport" and God knows what else. In fact, a right to marry might well be found to be a "privilege or immunity of US citizenship" - and if that happens, the gay marriage debate would come to an end in favor of the gays!
And that, most likely, is why the NRA (on behalf of the GOP!) argued against this broader view of the PorI clause (at the McDonald hearing, summer of 2010) and wanted it to remain narrowly restricted to a ban on cross-border discrimination by states in line with Ward and Saenz.
So. JimDandy is on the right track here, asking about using the
narrow view of the PorI clause that the US Supremes bothered to leave us in 1870 and 1999.
Another place this should kick in hard: California recognizes no out of state permits and will not issue a permit to a non-resident. Only California residents have any access to legal CCW, as meager as that is in most counties. I'm now a resident of Alabama...I'm completely hosed if I go to Cali.
