Reiss Insitute Seminar of the Second Amendment

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The New-York Historical Society’s Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce its fall 2023 seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty, "The Contested Meaning of the Second Amendment."  It will be presented in person at the New-York Historical Society and via Zoom on Fridays, November 17, December 1, 8, and 15, 2023, from 2–5 pm ET.  The instructors are Saul Cornell and Jennifer Tucker.

Few issues in American law are as deeply contested as the meaning of the Second Amendment and the scope of permissible gun regulation. Contemporary Second Amendment jurisprudence is distinctive in its focus on using history to shape contemporary legal interpretation. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, for example, means that gun-control laws of today must demonstrate a clear historical pedigree or genealogy to pass constitutional muster. Weapons regulations without such a historical foundation are likely to be struck down regardless of the modern public-safety rationale behind them. This seminar will explore the contested history of the meaning of the Second Amendment by exploring a variety of historical, legal, and cultural sources. Although once a neglected field of historical inquiry, Second Amendment scholarship has been transformed by the rise of originalism and the Supreme Court’s embrace of this controversial but indisputably ascendant theory of constitutional interpretation. How do historians and originalists understand the constitutional past? What sources and interpretive tools do scholars employ to make sense of the historical record? How do we address the many silences in the record? This seminar will explore these questions and others as we make sense of the meaning of the right to keep and bear arms.
    
Apply by October 11, 2023.  More.