Text, History, and Tradition: What the Seventh Amendment Can Teach Us About the Second

87 Pages Posted: 20 Apr 2012 Last revised: 23 Jan 2013

See all articles by Darrell A. H. Miller

Darrell A. H. Miller

The University of Chicago Law School; Duke University School of Law

Date Written: January 18, 2013

Abstract

In District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court made seemingly irreconcilable demands on lower courts: evaluate Second Amendment claims through history, avoid balancing, and retain as much regulation as possible. To date, lower courts have been unable to devise a test that satisfies all three of these conditions. Worse, the emerging default candidate, intermediate scrutiny, is a test that many jurists and scholars consider exceedingly manipulable. This Article argues that courts could look to the Supreme Court’s Seventh Amendment jurisprudence, and in particular the Seventh Amendment’s “historical test,” to help them devise a test for the Second. The historical test relies primarily on analogical reasoning from text, history, and tradition to determine the constitutionality of any given practice or regulation. Yet the historical test is supple enough to respond to the demands of a twenty-first-century judicial system. As such, it provides valuable insights, but also its own set of problems, for those judges and scholars struggling to implement the right to keep and bear arms.

Keywords: gun, firearm, militia, Second Amendment, first amendment, Fourth Amendment, guns, firearms, Heller, Mcdonald, jurisprudence, doctrine, free speech, arms, history, Seventh Amendment, jury, trial, Constitution, Bill of Rights, originalism, common law, custom

Suggested Citation

Miller, Darrell A. H., Text, History, and Tradition: What the Seventh Amendment Can Teach Us About the Second (January 18, 2013). Yale Law Journal, Vol. 122, No. 4, 2013, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2017288

Darrell A. H. Miller (Contact Author)

The University of Chicago Law School ( email )

1111 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

Duke University School of Law

210 Science Drive
Durham, NC 27708
United States

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