"Ecstatic" may be the word to describe Randy Barnett as he reacts to the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.  The Court ruled DC's ban on handguns was an unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment.  Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Barnett gives highest praise to the reasoning in Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion.

Justice Scalia's opinion is exemplary for the way it was reasoned. It will be studied by law professors and students for years to come. It is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be adopted by a majority of the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia begins with the text, and carefully parses the grammatical relationship of the "operative clause" identifying "the right to keep and bear arms" to the "prefatory clause" about the importance of a "well-regulated militia." Only then does he consider the extensive evidence of original meaning that has been uncovered by scholars over the past 20 years – evidence that was presented to the Court in numerous "friends of the court" briefs.

Justice Scalia's opinion is the finest example of what is now called "original public meaning" jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court.

Barnett is also optimistic about the future for individual rights in America.  Once again, from his WSJ editorial:

...how will the court deal with firearms regulations that fall short of a ban? The majority opinion strongly suggests that such regulations must now be subjected to meaningful judicial scrutiny. The exact nature of this scrutiny is not clear, but Justice Scalia explicitly rejects the extremely deferential "rationality" review advocated by Justice Stephen Breyer.

Most likely, gun laws will receive the same sort of judicial scrutiny that is now used to evaluate "time, place and manner" regulations of speech and assembly. Such regulations of First Amendment freedoms are today upheld if they are narrowly tailored to achieve a truly important government purpose, but not if they are really a pretext for undermining protected liberties.`

Writing in the Volokh Conspiracy, Barnett rejoices at the discovery of another boost to individual rights found in Scalia's opinion.

SUPREME COURT ADOPTS INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS INTERPRETATION OF THE NINTH AMENDMENT:! Buried in Justice Scalia's exegesis on the Second Amendment is a wonderful gift to those of us who study and care about the Ninth Amendment:

The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase “right of the people” two other times, in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not “collective” rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.

Three provisions of the Constitution refer to “the people” in a context other than “rights”—the famous preamble (“We the people”), §2 of Article I (providing that “the people” will choose members of the House), and the Tenth Amendment (providing that those powers not given the Federal Government remain with “the States” or “the people”). Those provisions arguably refer to “the people” acting collectively—but they deal with the exercise or reservation of powers, not rights. Nowhere else in the Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer to anything other than an individual right.

In other words, the Supreme Court has now rejected the "collective rights" reading of the Ninth Amendment that has been put forth by Akhil Amar and Kurt Lash.

Adds Barnet, "...this is big."

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