A new paradigm for the second amendment

Law and History Review

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 161-167

  Cornell, Saul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950387733     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/4141668     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. For introductions to this body of scholarship, see Robert J. Cottrol, ed. , Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment (Westport, Ct. : Garland Publishing, 1994)
2. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, "A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment," Tennessee Law Review 62 (1995): 461-512
3. Saul Cornell, ed. , Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000)
4. and Carl T. Bogus, "The History and Politics of Second Amendment Scholarship: A Primer," Chicago Kent Law Review 76 (2000): 3-25.
5. Second Amendment scholarship is a classic example of Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm change. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)
6. and David Hollinger, "T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History," American Historical Review, 78 (1973): 370-93.
7. For a concise overview of the origins of the current paradigm crisis in Second Amendment scholarship, see Saul Cornell, "'Don't Know Much About History': The Current Crisis in Second Amendment Scholarship," Northern Kentucky Law Review 29 (2002): 657-81.
8. United States v. Emerson, 270 F. 3d 203 (5th Cir. )
9. reh'g and reh'g en banc denied, 281 F. 3d 1281 (5th Cir. 2001)
10. cert. denied. 122 S. Ct. 2362 (2002).
11. Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F. 3d 1052 (9th Cir. 2002).
12. Richard A. Primus, The American Language of Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
13. David Yassky, "The Second Amendment: Structure, History, and Constitutional Change," University of Michigan Law Review 99 (2000): 588-688
14. Cornell, "'Don't Know Much About History. '"
15. Julian P. Boyd et al. , ed. , The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 28 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-), 1: 353.
16. Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778)
17. Gilbert Chinard, The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 314.
18. On the influence of Beccaria more generally, see David Lundberg and Henry May, "The Enlightened Reader In America," American Quarterly 28 (1976): 262-93
19. and Donald S. Lutz, "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth Century American Political Thought," American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 189-97.
20. According to May, only slightly more than one-third of all libraries in the period 1777-90 contained a copy1of the essay by Beccaria favored by Jefferson. In his study of the patterns of citation to various thinkers in published writing in the Founding era, Donald Lutz found that Beccaria accounted for about 1% of citations in the 1770s, 3% in the 1780s and 0% in the 1790s. Stephen Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984)
21. Randy Barnett and Don Kates, "Under Fire: The New Consensus on The Second Amendment," Emory Law Journal 45 (1996): 1139-259.
22. Both authors also make much of the decision of John Adams to quote another passage from Beccaria in the context of the Boston Massacre. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds. , Legal Papers of John Adams, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 3: 242.
23. For another individual rights scholar who falls into the Jeffersonian fallacy, see L. A. Powe, "Guns, Words, and Constitutional Interpretation," William and Mary Law Review 38 (1997): 1311-403.
24. "Virginia Declaration of Rights," in Founders' Constitution, ed. Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 1:6
25. Julian P. Boyd et al. , eds. , The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1: 353.
26. Don Higginbotham, "The Second Amendment in Historical Context," Constitutional Commentary 16 (1999): 263-68
27. Jack N. Rakove, "The Second Amendment as the Highest State of Originalism," Chicago-Kent Law Review 76 (2000): 129-32.
28. Saul Cornell, "Commonplace or Anachronism: The Standard Model, the Second Amendment, and the Problem of History in Contemporary Constitutional Theory," Constitutional Commentary 16 (1999): 221-46.
29. For examples of individual rights scholarship that might be characterized in these terms, see Kates and Barnett, "Under Fire," and Nelson Lund, "The Ends of Second Amendment Jurisprudence: Firearms Disabilities and Domestic Violence Restraining Orders," Texas Review of Law & Politics 4 (1999): 157-91.
30. For a sampling of alternate history science fiction, see Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. , The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (New York: Ballantine, 2001)
31. Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt, eds. , Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History (New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 1998)
32. Karen Hellekson, "Toward a Taxonomy of the Alternate History Genre," Extrapolation 41 (2000): 248-56
33. and Gavriel Rosenfeld, "Why Do We Ask 'What If?': Reflection on the Function of Alternate History," History and Theory 41 (2002): 90-103.
34. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
35. On the public and collective conception of the right of assembly, see Primus, American Language of Rights
36. on the jury as a collective and public right, see Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
37. David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 9-12.
38. David B. Kopel, "The Second Amendment in the Nineteenth Century," Brigham Young University Law Review 4 (1998): 1393
39. which attacks Keith Ehrman and Dennis Henigan, "The Second Amendment in the Twentieth Century: Have You Seen Your Militia Lately?" University of Dayton Law Review 15 (1989): 5-58.
40. Joseph Story, A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States (1842), 264-65.
41. Reprint Boston: Harper Brothers, 1879.
42. Joel Tiffany, A Treatise on the Unconstitutionality of American Slavery (1849). Reprint Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969.
43. An excellent introduction to Story's thought and his arguments with contemporaries may be found in, R. Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesmen of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
44. Story, Familiar Exposition, 264-65.
45. On the decline of the militia as an institution in the early republic, see Mark Pitcavage, "An Equitable Burden: The Decline of The State Militias, 1783-1858," Ph. D. Diss. , Ohio State University, 1995.
46. On the jeremiad as an important American literary form, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
47. Christopher L. Eisgruber, Constitutional Self-Govemment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 120-26.
48. Several gun rights advocates have suggested recreating the militia, but usually ignore the intrusive nature of the kinds of regulation necessary to create a well-regulated militia. See David Kopel and Christoper Little, "Communitarians, Neorepublicans, and Guns: Assessing the Case for Firearms Prohibition," Maryland Law Review 56 (1997): 438-554
49. and Brannon P. Denning, and Glenn Harlan Reynolds, "It Takes a Militia: A Communitarian Case for Compulsory Arms Bearing," William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 5 (1996): 185-214.
50. H. Richard Uviller and William G. Menkel, The Militia and the Right to Arms, Or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Durham: Duke University Press 2002).