Fourteenth Amendment Commons^™

Dignity And Second Amendment Enforcement—Response To William D. Araiza’S, Arming The Second Amendment And Enforcing The Fourteenth, Darrell A. H. Miller

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

William Araiza’s insightful article, Arming the Second Amendment, has one essential, hidden component: dignity. Dignity helps explain the peculiar hydraulics of Congress’s power to enforce section five of the Fourteenth Amendment—a jurisprudence in which the less scrutiny the Court itself applies to a given class or right, the more scrutiny it applies to congressional efforts to protect that same class or right. Dignity helps explain the Court’s halting approach to Reconstruction Amendment enforcement power more generally – an approach in which constitutional versus unconstitutional legislation turns on seemingly insignificant regulatory distinctions. And dignity’s role in § 5 enforcement helps explain …

The Privileges And Immunities Of Non-Citizens, R. George Wright

Cleveland State Law Review

However paradoxically, in some practically important contexts, non-citizens of all sorts can rightly claim what amount to privileges and immunities of citizens. This follows from a careful and entirely plausible understanding of the inherently relational, inescapably social, and essentially reciprocal nature of at least some typical privileges and immunities.

This Article contends that the relationship between constitutional privileges and immunities and citizenship is more nuanced, and much more interesting, than usually recognized. Crucially, allowing some non-citizens to invoke the privileges and immunities of citizens often makes sense. The intuitive sense that non-citizens cannot logically claim the privileges or immunities of …

The First Congressional Debate On Public Carry And What It Tells Us About Firearm Regionalism, Mark Anthony Frassetto

Campbell Law Review

In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, a prominent issue remains unresolved: whether, or to what extent, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms outside of the home. This Article explores this unresolved issue through a newly uncovered source, the congressional debates surrounding the District of Columbia's public carry law in the 1890s.

These debates provide new insights into the understanding of the right to keep and bear arms in the years following the drafting and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Two conclusions can be drawn from the debate. First, there was no …