Second Amendment Realism

Abstract

Glenn Reynolds has written that the “Second Amendment is now ordinary constitutional law.” I agree with that statement, and in this Symposium piece, I argue that the development of Second Amendment jurisprudence and Second Amendment scholarship will now suffer all of the defects that come along with the practice of ordinary constitutional law — including significant and irreducible doctrinal indeterminacy, results-driven reasoning by judges and academics, judicial self-aggrandizement, centralization of decision-making in Washington, DC, and increasing left-right socio-political polarization. All of these factors tend toward a decrease in the legitimacy and prestige of the Supreme Court and a decrease in the legitimacy and prestige of constitutional law as an academic endeavor.

Keywords: Second Amendment, Constitutional interpretation, realism, spam jurisprudence, legal academia, indeterminacy