COMMERCE CLAUSE NEWS: I haven’t read the opinion yet, but Larry Solum reports that the Ninth Circuit has held that the federal government can’t ban homemade machine guns under the Commerce Clause, since they’re not in interstate commerce. He notes that this has implications for homegrown marijuana, too.

As I say, I haven’t read the opinion, but it sounds like a defensible position to me. [Any position is defensible with enough homemade machine guns! — Ed. I think you’ve had too many of those brownies. . . .]

UPDATE: Volokh says this is huge.

ANOTHER UPDATE: For some background on these issues, you might want to read this article that Brannon Denning and I wrote in the Wisconsin Law Review on Commerce Clause issues in the lower courts, and this followup piece from the Commerce Clause symposium issue of the Arkansas Law Review. (That symposium was terrific, but as far as I know the whole issue isn’t online. Here, however, is Randy Barnett’s contribution.) We have a long-term, quasi-empirical project looking at how the Lopez case is percolating through the lower courts, and back through the Supreme Court. This case will surely make the next installment.