argb1440“Awell regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of thepeople to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Amendment II, Constitution of the United States

“For too long, most members of the legal academy have treated the SecondAmendment as the equivalent of an embarassing relative, whose mentionbrings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, familymembers. That will no longer do. It is time for the Second Amendment toenter full scale into the consciousness of the legal academy.”

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tx12240s24Sanford Levinson, McCormick Professor of Law, University ofTexas, The Embarassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale L.J. 637(1989)

“Were the Second Amendment a mere federalism (‘State’srights’) provision, as it is not, it would assuredly appear in a placeappropriate to that purpose (i.e., not in the same list with Firstthrough Eighth Amendments, but nearby the Tenth Amendment) and it woulddoubtless reflect the same federalism style as the Tenth.... Instead, it iscast in terms that track the provisions of the neighboring personal rightsguarantees of the Bill of Rights....”

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tx12240s24William Van Alstyne, Perkins Professor of Law, Duke Univ., The Second Amendment, 43 Duke L.J. 1236, 1243 (1994)

“The argument that today’s National Guardsmen, members of aselect militia, would constitute the only  persons entitled to keepand bear arms has no historical foundation.”

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tx12240s24Joyce Lee Malcolm, Harvard Law and NEH Fellow, To Keep andBear Arms 163 (Harvard University Press 1994)

“...’the people’ seems to have been a term of art employed inselect parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that theConstitution is ordained and established by ‘the People of the UnitedStates.’ The Second Amendment protects ‘the right of the people tokeep and bear arms,’ and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide thatcertain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to ‘thepeople.’ See also U.S. Const. Amdt. I (“Congress shall make no law... abridging ... the right of the people  peaceably to assemble”).... While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggeststhat ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the Firstand Second Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of anational community....”

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tx12240s24United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990).

“The states’ rights reading puts great weight on the word‘militia,’ but this word appears only in the Amendment’ssubordinate clause. The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to‘the people’ not the ‘states.’ As the language of the TenthAmendment shows, these two are of course not identical and when theConstitution means ‘states’ it says so. Thus, as noted above, ‘thepeople’ at the core of the Second Amendment are the same ‘people’at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely citizens.”

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tx12240s24Akil Amar, Professor of Law, Yale, The Bill of Rights as aConstitution, 100 Yale L.J. 1131, 1166 (1990)
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	The past five years have witnessed a renaissance in academictreatment of the Second Amendment. The undersigned propose to organize agroup of Arizona lawyers for the purpose of exploring the history,parameters, and modern role of the Second Amendment. Interested lawyersshould contact:

William Risner      Robert Corbin     David T. Hardy     SandraS. Froman     John P. Arnold
Tucson                      Phoenix                TucsonTucson                           Tucson   
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