The Second Amendment on Trial: Critical Essays on District of Columbia v. Heller

Acknowledgments

This volume was begun in 2006 as an effort on the part of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University to bring together some of the best new scholarship on different aspects of the Second Amendment debate. The original structure of the volume included separate sections on history, law, and public policy, including some of the new work sponsored by the Center that was first presented at a series of conferences the Center organized. As the volume was taking shape, the Supreme Court agreed in November 2007 to take its first Second Amendment case in more than seventy years. Publishing a volume of scholarly essays when the Supreme Court was poised to redefine the legal meaning of the amendment did not make much sense, so plans for publication were shelved until Heller was decided. Before the decision had even been announced, plans and invitations for a variety of conferences on the case were in the works, so it seemed prudent to wait and see what emerged from these conferences before conceptualizing what such a volume should now include. At first it seemed that the recast volume would remain unchanged with the addition of a new section on Heller. After looking at the new scholarship written in response to Heller, we realized that the decision was sufficiently Z Z Z Z Acknowledgments Z Z Z Z vii viii acknowledgments complex and important enough to warrant an entire volume. Although many of the nation’s leading legal scholars had avoided the subject of the Second Amendment prior to Heller, the case drew some of them into the subject for the first time. The one obvious issue that the Court did not resolve in its June 2008 opinion, an issue that everyone knew would be resolved quickly, was the incorporation question. McDonald v. City of Chicago settled the incorporation issue in 2010, but not any of the major legal issues that Heller left unresolved. So once again, the volume was put on hold on the assumption that McDonald would generate an equally significant body of literature as Heller. Surprisingly, McDonald has not produced a comparable body of writing about the Second Amendment and gun regulation. Thus, we made the decision to focus exclusively on Heller as the case that redefined the way scholars, judges, and politicians talk about the Second Amendment. The essays collected in this volume explore Heller’s significance from a variety of different perspectives. We had hoped to include an essay by Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm in the original volume, since she is one of the few historians to support the Standard Model’s individual rights conception of the amendment, but she denied us permission to republish her essay. Not wanting to lose her unique perspective, we decided to include the amicus brief she filed in Heller and pair it with another brief by leading early American historians. Including the amicus briefs gives the volume a unique coherence. It is possible to view the historical arguments presented to the Court and then read the scholarly reactions to how the Court used them. This volume is the final product of the Second Amendment Research Center’s efforts to bring greater historical and analytical rigor to scholarly discussion of the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court’s decision in Heller effectively rendered new historical research on the Second Amendment moot, at least in terms of its application to current law. Although history continues to be important to the resolution of ongoing litigation on the scope of Second Amendment protections, both sides in American politics, liberals and conservatives , have embraced Heller’s individual rights view of the Second Amendment . For the foreseeable future there is little reason to expect this to change. We thank The Joyce Foundation for its generous support of the Second Amendment Research Center’s work, which helped defray the costs of publishing this volume. Many thanks to our editor at University of Massachusetts Press, Clark Dougan, who immediately grasped the significance of the project and showed incredible patience as we tried to keep pace with the rapidly Acknowledgments ix unfolding history discussed in this volume. This project has evolved significantly over the past six years and it is a much better volume thanks to his efforts. The production team at the University of Massachusetts Press was a pleasure to work with at every phase of the process. We...