Law Commons^™

The American Tradition Of Self-Made Arms, Joseph G.S. Greenlee

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Faces Of The Second Amendment Outside The Home, Take Three: Critiquing The Circuit Courts Use Of History-In-Law, Patrick J. Charles

Cleveland State Law Review

This article seeks to critique the circuit courts’ varying history-in-law approaches, as well as to provide advice on the proper role that history-in-law plays when examining the scope of the Second Amendment outside the home. This article sets forth to accomplish this task in three parts. Part I argues why history-in-law is appropriate when adjudicating Second Amendment decisions outside the home. Part II examines the benefits and burdens of utilizing history-in-law as a method of constitutional interpretation, while breaking down the alternative approaches employed by circuit courts when adjudicating Second Amendment decisions outside the home. Lastly, Part III offers practical …

Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay is part of a symposium issue dedicated to "Constitutional Rights: Intersections, Synergies, and Conflicts" at William and Mary School of Law. I make four points. First, perfect harmony among rights might not always be normatively desirable. In fact, in some instances, such as when First Amendment and Second Amendment rights clash, we might wish to have expressive rights consistently trump gun rights. Second, we can't resolve clashes between rights in the abstract but instead must consult history in a broadly relevant rather than a narrowly "originalist" fashion. When we do so, we learn that armed expression and white …

The Posse Comitatus And The Office Of Sheriff: Armed Citizens Summoned To The Aid Of Law Enforcement, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

Posse comitatus is the legal power of sheriffs and other officials to summon armed citizens to aid in keeping the peace. The posse comitatus can be traced back as least as far as the reign of Alfred the Great in ninth century England. The institution thrives today in the United States; a study of Colorado finds many county sheriffs have active posses. Like the law of the posse comitatus, the law of the office of sheriff has been remarkably stable for over a millennium. This Article presents the history and law of the posse comitatus and the office of sheriff …

St. George Tucker’S Second Amendment: Deconstructing ‘The True Palladium Of Liberty’, Stephen P. Halbrook

ExpressO

St. George Tucker, known as “America’s Blackstone” and author of the first commentary on the Constitution in 1803, described the Second Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms as “the true palladium of liberty.” In a recent symposium at the William and Mary College of Law, Prof. Saul Cornell presented Tucker as an adherent of the view that the Amendment guarantees a collective or civic right to bear arms in the militia, not an individual right to have arms for self defense or as a dissuasion to tyranny. In response, my article scrutinizes Tucker’s work in detail …

The Inconvenient Militia Clause Of The Second Amendment: Why The Supreme Court Declines To Resolve The Debate Over The Rights To Bear Arms, Robert M. Hardaway, Elizabeth Gormley, Bryan Taylor

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

There are sound public policy reasons why gun ownership by law abiding citizens in a free society should be protected. Good public policy, however, cannot be formulated as long as there remain fundamental misconceptions about the meaning and history of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the law interpreting it. In August of 1994, an exasperated American Bar Association, finding itself unable to match the Gun Lobby's publicity campaigns, pleaded for help from the legal profession to educate the American public about the meaning of the Second Amendment and the intent of the Constitutional Framers. Specifically, the ABA …

All The Way Down The Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition In England And Some Lessons For Civil Liberties In America, David B. Kopel, Joseph Olson

David B Kopel

Whenever civil liberties issues are contested, proponents of greater restrictions often chide civil liberties defenders for being unwilling to offer moderate concessions. Frequently, persons advocating restrictions on civil liberties claim that the "moderate" restriction will not infringe the core civil liberty. When rights advocates raise the "slippery slope" argument, they are criticized for being excessively fearful. The goal of the article is to refine our understanding of "slippery slopes" by examining a case in which a civil liberty really did slide all the way down the slippery slope.

The right to arms in Great Britain was entirely unrestricted at the …