Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Siegel, Reva B

Titel

Dead or alive: originalism as popular constitutionalism in Heller

Ist Teil von

• Harvard law review, 2008-11, Vol.122 (1), p.191-245

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Harvard Law Review Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

Nexis Uni (LexisNexis)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• For many, constitutional law changed because the Court interpreted the Second Amendment in accordance with the understandings of the Americans who ratified it: District of Columbia v. Heller marks the "Triumph of Originalism." Others saw the case very differently, observing that the Court had interpreted the Second Amendment in accordance with the convictions of the twentieth-century gun-rights movement and so had demonstrated the ascendancy of the living Constitution. Part I of this article begins by examining the temporal locus of authority in the Heller opinion itself. Part II examines chapters of American constitutional history not discussed in Heller -- debates about the Second Amendment that transpired in the shadow of Brown v. Board of Education. In analyzing the conflict leading up to Heller, Part III provides a positive and interpretive account of how the boundary between constitutional law and constitutional politics has been negotiated in recent decades.