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\"The Partisan Republic is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. The book focuses on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more \"democratic\" vision premised on the exclusion of women and non-whites. It incorporates recent scholarship on topics ranging from judicial review to popular constitutionalism to place judicial initiatives like Marbury v. Madisonin a broader, socio-legal context. The book recognizes the role of constitutional outsiders as agents in shaping the law, making figures such as the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten part of a cast of characters that has traditionally been limited to white, male elites such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall. Finally, it shows how the \"democratic\" political party came to supplant the Supreme Court as the nation's preeminent constitutional institution\"-- Provided by publisher.

Moving beyond the current flaws in originalism will require developing a genuinely historical approach to reading Founding era texts that draws on the best inter-disciplinary methods available. Reading legal texts historically will require originalism adopt standard historical practices, not reject them. Scholars must get the history right before deciding if any of the historical meanings recoverable from a careful study of the original debate over the Constitution might be relevant to modern law. Determining which meanings might be probative or dispositive for modern legal issues is a separate task from the process of uncovering the legal meaning of Founding era constitutional texts. Deciding what, if any relevance, such historical meaning ought to have in contemporary law is at its core a legal question, and not one that history can answer. Still, if legal scholars are going to cite history as authority, they have an obligation to get the history right.

INTERSUBJECTIVE MEANING Historians have been among the fiercest critics of originalism.1 Among the many virtues of Jack Balkin's book, Memory and Authority, is the deft way he analyzes and dismantles these efforts to insulate originalism from historical critique.2 In a short essay, it would be impossible to fully acknowledge the sophistication of Balkin's analysis. In this sense, originalists are about a century behind the times in terms of their ontological and epistemological assumptions.6 Recognizing that meaning is intersubjective requires shifting focus away from a search for an objective truth, referential theories of meaning, and instead focusing on meaning as a social construct, functional theories of meaning.7 Once one realizes that originalism rests on a serious mischaracterization of the way constitutional communication functioned in the Founding Era, one of originalism's foundational claims, the socalled fixation thesis, crumbles.8 Although originalism comes in almost as many flavors as the breakfast cereals lining the shelves in a modern American grocery store, it has about the same nutritional value, which is to say it is mostly empty calories offering little sustenance. The claim that historians do not understand the law and are therefore incompetent to evaluate the original meaning of legal texts, including the Constitution, has been frequently repeated by originalists, but it has never been well documented or substantiated with any hard evidence-a common failing of much originalist scholarship, which often has a thin veneer of empirical rigor, but generally relies on impressionistic assessments and cherry-picked evidence to support its interpretations.12 Moreover, this argument ignores the fact that modern lawyers are typically not well-schooled in the interpretive practices or legal culture of the Founding Era.13 Even among those who claim to employ original methods in their analysis of Founding Era law the results are deeply anachronistic and often riddled with errors.14 No originalist has been more strident in making this type of guild argument than Randy Barnett: \"[S]ome [historians] apparently believe that they, and they alone, can recover the meaning of a law enacted in the Eighteenth Century when they would not be able to understand the meaning of a law enacted in the Twenty-First. Take the issue of statutory interpretation raised by Barnett.25 Sophisticated empirical studies by Abbe Gluck have demonstrated that even those charged with writing and interpreting the nation's laws, whose staffs include scores of lawyers, are often not fully conversant with the rules of modern statutory construction.26 I think it is fair to say that most legal scholars who do not teach or publish in a particular area are typically not reliable guides on cutting-edge issues in legal analysis in fields outside of their expertise.

Fear of centralized authority is deeply rooted in American history. The struggle over the U.S. Constitution in 1788 pitted the Federalists, supporters of a stronger central government, against the Anti-Federalists, the champions of a more localist vision of politics. But, argues Saul Cornell, while the Federalists may have won the battle over ratification, it is the ideas of the Anti-Federalists that continue to define the soul of American politics. While no Anti-Federalist party emerged after ratification, Anti-Federalism continued to help define the limits of legitimate dissent within the American constitutional tradition for decades. Anti-Federalist ideas also exerted an important influence on Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism. Exploring the full range of Anti-Federalist thought, Cornell illustrates its continuing relevance in the politics of the early Republic. A new look at the Anti-Federalists is particularly timely given the recent revival of interest in this once neglected group, notes Cornell. Now widely reprinted, Anti-Federalist writings are increasingly quoted by legal scholars and cited in Supreme Court decisions--clear proof that their authors are now counted among the ranks of America's founders.

Cornell comments on Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. Maier deliberately steer clears of the complex and often acrimonious modern debates surrounding the constitutional theory of originalism. The relevance of her work to this theory seems obvious; her account largely vindicates Jack Rakove's contention that people lack a calculus to sum up the multiple and conflicting intents of the ratifiers. Although her work is counter-progressive in spirit, rejecting class as a primary organizing framework, Ratification is decidedly not a work of traditional consensus history. The state ratification contests she chronicles are seething with tensions.

Firearms violence in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, with more than 30 000 Americans dying as a result of gun violence each year.1 Proposals for more effective gun regulation inevitably trigger arguments that the Second Amendment poses limits on such policies and that reasonable regulations are infringements on Second Amendment rights. [...]any member of the local community could approach a local justice of the peace and demand that an individual who posed a potential threat be forced to provide a peace bond, something akin to the types of bail bonds currently used when suspects in criminal prosecutions await trial.3 MODERN AMERICAN LAW Although the Second Amendment is often invoked by both sides in the contemporary gun debate, each side tends to focus on only part of the amendment. [...]as now, most Americans accepted that the right to bear arms was perfectly consistent with a wide range of firearms regulations.7 Modern laws such as \"extreme risk protection orders\" that seek to remove firearms from those who demonstrate a threat to personal or public safety are thus part of a long legal history extending back more than five centuries, a venerable tradition that seeks to regulate liberty while securing public safety.

On the final day of its 2008 term, a sharply divided US Supreme Court issued a five to four decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. Reversing almost seventy years of settled precedent that linked the meaning of the \"right of the people to keep and bear arms\" with the preservation of a \"well-regulated militia,\" Heller interpreted the Second Amendment as an individual right to possess a weapon for self-defense outside of the context of service in a well-regulated militia. This article analyzes a neglected area of Second Amendment scholarship: the role of common law restrictions on the scope of keeping and bearing arms in the period between the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the Early American Republic (1800-1835).

The scholarly debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment and the scope of gun regulation has been marred by ideological distortions. Michael Bellesiles, an ardent supporter of collective rights theory, argued that state control over weapons was virtually unlimited. Now Robert Churchill, a champion of individual rights theory, stakes out an equally bold position. In his view, a distinct and separate right to keep arms evolved under American law. According to this new variant of individual rights theory, the state might regulate bearing arms, but it was prohibited from regulating the right to keep arms.

James Lindgren's recent forward to The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology's 2015 symposium on \"The Past and Future of Guns,\" purports to be a neutral and scholarly account of the current state of the debate on the meaning of the Second Amendment. Lindgren's introductory essay fails to achieve both of these goals. Rather than survey the pre-Heller scholarship in a comprehensive and even-handed manner, Lindgren provides a distorted and superficial account of the historical literature. He compounds this error by ignoring the vast post-Heller scholarly literature, failing to note that much of this recent body of scholarship has been deeply critical of Heller, and has generally vindicated the work of the historians he criticizes. Indeed, the evidence he himself offers in defense of his interpretation actually undercuts his claims about the meaning of the Second Amendment. Lindgren's essay does not chart a path forward in this contentious debate, but proffers an incomplete and analytically flawed account of the Founding Era's understanding of this important provision of the Constitution.