I'm posting this piece because it engages a variety of historical sources. The line between works of interest to legal historians and advocacy pieces is not always clear, but some readers are engaged in the "public meaning" turn of originalist scholarship, so I will occasionally post such pieces. What you will not see on this blog, however, are works that purport to engage in "original public meaning" analysis, but support their arguments only with a New York Times database search, or other limited engagement of sources. "Original public meaning" should be approached as a form of intellectual history, and practitioners of this form of scholarship should draw upon the conventions of the field of intellectual history. No intellectual historian would limit her/himself to one source. A reading of historical newspapers might inform an analysis of the history of the press. But for broader claims about what the "public" thought on a particular topic, deeper work is, of course, needed.
Here's the Clayton, Johnson and Mocsary abstract:
If the Fourteenth Amendment is found to incorporate the Second Amendment against the states, what meaning of the Second Amendment does it include? This paper examines judicial and popular understandings of the Second Amendment in the period between ratification of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.
