Constitutional Law

Mayor Bloomberg has problems with 1st as well as the 2nd amendment

According to the New York Sun, Mayor Bloomberg has moved, in the suit against a GA gun dealer, to forbid the defense from mentioning the Second Amendment. As the paper notes, "While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity."

I suppose we'll see if Hon. Jack Weinstein has problems with both amendments as well.

UPDATE: it's called "long arm jurisdiction." A very technical end of the law (took a case to the state Supreme Court on it once). Basically, you can sue a person or company where they reside, and also sue a company where it "does business," so to speak. If you go beyond that, it's a denial of due process. The question of how much contact the company has to have with a State is confused and confusing, even at the US Supreme Court level. But local courts of course want to assert jurisdiction (having locals sue out of Staters sounds like a great idea). In my case, it was product liability, a single action being dropped and firing. The mfr was in Italy. At the time the gun was sold, the mfr had no advertising in the US, no local company. Its sole contact had been to make one lot of arms, which an American importer based in Connecticut picked up in Italy and sold in the US. Twenty years later, one of them was dropped in AZ and fired, killing a local. How it got from CN to AZ was not determined; someone could have bought it back east and moved here.

AS Supremes held that the AZ courts had jurisdiction over the Italian manufacturer, and the US Supremes denied cert..

Purposeful availment--I forget how they dealt with that. Claimed to go with the Asahi plurality, using that standard, but then construed it to mean ... memory is faint, but it was something like: this was shipped to the US, a single-action is a Western looking gun and would be likely appeal to a person in a Western state such as AZ, aha, that's purposeful availment of AZ markets! The state Supremes were very pro-plaintiff then, which I didn't mind since I mostly do plaintiffs' work. The case was A. Uberti v. Leonardo, 181 Ariz. 565, 892 P.2d 1354 (1995).

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on May 09, 2008 (boomark / email).