"A well regulated militia being necessary to a free state, the right of the people 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 Second Amendment as the equivalent of an embarassing relative, whose mention brings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, family members. That will no longer do. It is time for the Second Amendment to enter full scale into the consciousness of the legal academy."

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

"Were the Second Amendment a mere federalism ('State's rights') provision, as it is not, it would assuredly appear in a place appropriate to that purpose (i.e., not in the same list with First through Eighth Amendments, but nearby the Tenth Amendment) and it would doubtless reflect the same federalism style as the Tenth.... Instead, it is cast in terms that track the provisions of the neighboring personal rights guarantees of the Bill of Rights...."

William 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 a select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation."

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

"...'the people' seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by 'the People of the United States.' The Second Amendment protects 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms,' and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to 'the people.' 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 suggests that 'the people' protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community...."

United 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's subordinate clause. The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to 'the people' not the 'states.' As the language of the Tenth Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical and when the Constitution means 'states' it says so. Thus, as noted above, 'the people' at the core of the Second Amendment are the same 'people' at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely citizens."

Akil Amar, Professor of Law, Yale, The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, 100 Yale L.J. 1131, 1166 (1990)