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Full-Text Articles in Law
British Impeachments (1376-1787) And The Preservation Of The American Constitutional Order, Frank O. Bowman Iii
British Impeachments (1376-1787) And The Preservation Of The American Constitutional Order, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Faculty Publications
Impeachment is a British invention, employed by Parliament beginning in 1376 to resist the general tendency of the monarchy to absolutism and to counter particularly obnoxious royal policies by removing the ministers who implemented them. The invention crossed the Atlantic with the British colonists who would one day rebel against their mother country and create an independent United States of America. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the delegates decided that presidents and other federal officers could be impeached, but they recoiled from the severe and occasionally fatal punishments imposed by Parliament, and they wrestled over what conduct should be …
The Diverging Right(S) To Bear Arms: Private Armament And The Second And Fourteenth Amendments In Historical Context, Alexander Gouzoules
The Diverging Right(S) To Bear Arms: Private Armament And The Second And Fourteenth Amendments In Historical Context, Alexander Gouzoules
Faculty Publications
This article compares the historical evolution of the social understanding of private armament with contemporary legal doctrine on the right to bear arms. The District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which held that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to self-defense, and the McDonald v. City of Chicago decision, which held the Second Amendment to be incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, both turned on extensive historical analysis. But by reading a broad “individual right to self-defense” into both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, the Court assumed continuity between the social understandings at the time of these amendments’ respective ratifications. …