Reuters/John Sommers II This article was originally published on The Conversation. Twenty years ago, when I was a law student taking constitutional law, the Second Amendment did not even come up in class. Today, as a law professor, I teach the Second Amendment as the very first case in my constitutional law class. The emergence of the Second Amendment in law school classrooms is a lesson in the ways politics and society drive constitutional debates, breathing meaning into our Constitution. The dormant amendment The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The only reference to this right in my law school casebook was tucked into a 1997 case where the court ruled that the federal government could not commandeer local officials to enforce federal law. There, Justice Clarence Thomas noted in an aside that the “Court has not had recent occasion to consider the nature of the substantive right safeguarded by the Second Amendment.” Before that case, the last time the Supreme Court had addressed the Second Amendment was in a 1939 ruling, when it linked the right to possess a gun to “the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” For the rest of the 20th century, a federal right to keep and bear arms was discussed only in a handful of law review articles, lower court cases and the occasional law school class. “Perhaps, at some future date,” Justice Thomas mused in 1997, “this Court will have the opportunity to determine whether” the Constitution guarantees a personal right to bear arms. Heller: Microcosm of constitutional law That opportunity came in spring of 2008, when the Supreme Court heard Washington, D.C., resident Dick Heller’s challenge to the city’s ban on keeping a handgun in his home. In a much-anticipated opinion issued that June, the court ruled “the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment.” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a textbook opinion for the court in what is known as the Heller case.
The Second Amendment Comes First In Teaching Constitutional Law
Anthony Johnstone, Salon: Politics
Sun, 04/22/2018 - 2:29pm
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