Law Commons^™

For many years following the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Miller,1 the orthodox opinion among academics and federal appeals courts alike was that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution did not protect possession of firearms unrelated to service in the lawfully established militia. 2 In recent decades, a growing chorus of polemicists, gun rights advocates, single-topic academics, and famously contrarian and exceedingly clever constitutional theorists (Sandy Levinson, Akhil Amar, Larry Tribe, and Randy Barnett among others) have challenged this old understanding on originalist grounds related to both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.3 While the once dominant …