Now in session

The U.S. Supreme Court term beginning this week will be the first with Sonia Sotomayor sitting as a member of the panel.

Despite the presumption Justice Sotomayor will take positions that favor government restrictions on individual liberty, however, her vote is seen as unlikely to shift the existing 5-4 "conservative" majority, which supports enhanced self-defense rights and free campaign speech. That's because Justice Sotomayor replaces retiring Justice David Souter, who was wrong on those issues, anyway.

Probably the most important case to be heard this term -- accepted by the court only last week -- is McDonald v. Chicago, in which petitioners seek to overturn as unconstitutional a handgun ban and other aspects of gun registration regulations affecting rifles and shotguns in Chicago.

This is the first such lawsuit to reach the court since the landmark ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which confirmed that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual right to "keep and bear arms."

Given the court's embrace of numerous "reasonable" municipal restrictions on that supposedly "uninfringeable" right in Heller, it's unlikely such a finding would allow teenagers to start buying machine guns over the counter at Wal-Mart anytime soon.

The case could, however, have ramifications beyond the field of firearms rights, because it asks the high court in effect to overrule the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases as subsequently interpreted. Those cases -- finding that the state of Louisiana could intervene in private business decisions in order to block harmful effects of slaughterhouses dumping animal offal into the New Orleans drinking water supply -- are generally held to have weakened the 14th Amendment's guarantee that states could no longer infringe the "privileges and immunities" of United States citizens.

If the Slaughterhouse cases are reinterpreted to confirm the "incorporation" of the Bill of Rights against state infringement, legal scholars say it's likely constitutional guarantees such as the right to a jury in civil cases, right to a grand jury in felony cases, and other parts of the Bill of Rights would be applied against the states automatically.

Arguments in the gun case will be heard in February.

The court will also hear cases, this term, on whether juveniles can be sentenced to life without parole; whether prosecutors can be sued for failure to share evidence that might exonerate a defendant; and whether there are limits to the legal doctrine that officeholders -- and even corporate CEOs -- can be prosecuted for depriving the public or (in the case of newspaper baron Conrad Black) shareholders of their "honest services."