Authoruclalaw

The Second Amendment right to arms was uniformly viewed as an individual right from the time it was proposed in the late eighteenth century until legal debate over gun controls began in the twentieth century. This Essay seeks to illuminate major late twentieth century contributions to that debate.

In recent years the gun control movement has increasingly shifted its efforts from lobbying for new gun-control legislation to facilitating lawsuits against the gun industry, especially those based on claims of negligent distribution of firearms. These lawsuits are based on the premise that organized gun trafficking, much of it involving corrupt or negligent licensed dealers, plays an important...

This Article seeks to historicize the meaning of the Second Amendment as well as the constitutional debate now swirling about it in the wake of District of Columbia v. Heller. This Article takes seriously the interpretive significance of the concept of “original public meaning” that figures so prominently in that decision; it seeks to examine—and even to apply—that concept more broadly to the...

District of Columbia v. Heller gave the Supreme Court an opportunity to apply a jurisprudence of original meaning to the Second Amendment’s manifestly puzzling text. Notwithstanding the Chief Justice’s decision to assign the majority opinion to Justice Scalia, the Court squandered the opportunity. In a narrow sense, the Constitution was vindicated in Heller because the Court reached an easily...

The Second Amendment is unusual in that until District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court had never interpreted the core meaning of the right. But it is that core meaning that, in recent years, has been in dispute. The issue is whether the Amendment was intended to protect a right for individuals to keep and bear arms, as the operative clause implies, or merely a right for states to have a...

Every state has passed laws, often called open records statutes or freedom of information acts, that provide for disclosure of certain information possessed by government agencies. But how does a state legislature decide which information should be subject to disclosure? Is there a discernable pattern in the types of records available to the public? Using concealed carry licenses as the main...

This Article considers whether and how originalism promotes the Constitution’s democratic legitimacy, in theory and in practice. In the late twentieth century, critics of the Warren and Burger courts argued that judicial review lacks democratic authority when judges depart from the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution. Originalism’s critics objected that giving past...

This Essay speculates about the substance and timing of likely decisions by lower courts and the Supreme Court in dealing with issues left open by District of Columbia v. Heller. It suggests that lower courts will not address those issues by examining original understandings regarding permissible gun regulations, but will instead apply to such regulations something like an intermediate standard...