The Plain and Ordinary Second Amendment: Heller and Heuristics

Abstract

In Heller, Justice Scalia argues that we must look to founding-era dictionaries to determine the meaning of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Dictionaries, however, are either descriptive or prescriptive in nature, and Scalia argues that the founding-era dictionaries will provide the understanding of words as the founding generation would have understood them. This is a logical fallacy, as the first descriptive dictionary was Webster's Third International in 1961. Thus, the only dictionaries available to Scalia for his textual analysis are prescriptive in nature. This paper, analyzes each dictionary's origin and definition for the words at issue in Heller. Additionally, in order to obtain descriptive definitions of the words at issue in Heller, the author used the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Although the paper concludes that the prescriptive and descriptive definitions concur, one ought to use the utmost care in textualism in order to avoid "looking over the crowd and picking out one's friends."

Keywords: Corpus linguistics, Second Amendment, textualism, Google N-gram, COCA, COHA