THE LIMITS OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT 
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled three weeks ago that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms. In the wake of that decision, Acting Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Michael Gary on Wednesday upheld a portion of New York’s gun possession law that permits “reasonable regulations for the possession of a firearm outside of the home.” As reported by The New York Law Journal, attorneys for Zabar Lynch, who was charged with illegally possessing a gun in a Chinese restaurant, fought to have the case dismissed since the State’s amorphous gun permit requirements — including that the applicant must be of “good moral character” — violated Heller. Justice Gary disagreed, and allowed the case to go forward, writing, “. . . nothing in the Second Amendment limits New York State’s ability to ban possession of certain weapons” and “licensing of those weapons is just one method used to exercise that power.”

SERIAL SPAMMER SENTENCED
From The Wall Street Journal comes word that Southern District Judge Denny Chin has sentenced a 27-year-old serial spammer to 30 months in prison. Adam Vitale was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails that advertised a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product’s profits. (Vitale sent out more than one million emails during one week in August 2005.) “Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child’s play,” said Judge Chin.

"CAVALIER," BUT NOT ILLEGAL 
The Law Journal also reports that Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has dodged a legal bullet. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Emily Jane Goodman ruled that Silver should not be held personally responsible for a $500,000 settlement the State reached with an Assembly staffer involved in a sexual encounter with Silver’s former chief counsel, though the Speaker's conduct in the case may have been “cavalier.” Eliot Spitzer, who was Attorney General at the time, was by law required to defend and indemnify Silver in the sexual discrimination claim and permitted to settle the case if Spitzer deemed it to be in the State’s best interests. “If in representing State officers in their official or individual capacities, the Attorney General errs in judgment in the conduct of the litigation, the remedy lies not before the Supreme Court, but at the polls,” wrote Goodman

WAITING FOR THE FEDS 
Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that a Latino advocacy group has accused federal immigration authorities of disenfranchising at least 55,000 Latino New Yorkers by not processing their citizenship applications speedily enough. “It is time for their wait to come to an end,” Malick Ghachem, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in early March by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, told Southern District Judge Lawrence McKenna. McKenna said he will rule shortly on whether to compel the feds to speed up the review process.