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For over seventy-five years Edward S. Corwin's text has been a basic reference in the study of U.S. Constitutional Law. The 14th edition, the first new edition since 1973, brings the volume up to date through 1977. In this classic work, historian Edward Corwin presented the text of the U.S. Constitution along with his own commentary on its articles, sections, clauses, and amendments. Corwin was a renowned authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, and was hired at Princeton University by Woodrow Wilson in 1905. Far from being an impersonal textbook, Corwin's edition was full of opinion. Not afraid to express his own strong views of the development of American law, Corwin offered piquant descriptions of the debates about the meaning of clauses, placing recent decisions of the court \"in the familiar setting of his own views.\" The favor of his style is evident in his comments on judicial review (\"American democracy's way of covering its bet\") and the cabinet (\"an administrative anachronism\" that should be replaced by a legislative council \"whose daily salt does not come from the Presidential table\"). Corwin periodically revised the book for nearly forty years, incorporating into each new edition his views of new Supreme Court rulings and other changes in American law. Although Corwin intended his book for the general public, his interpretations always gained the attention of legal scholars and practitioners. The prefaces he wrote to the revised editions were often controversial for the views he offered on the latest developments of constitutional law, and the book only grew in stature and recognition. After his death in 1963, other scholars prepared subsequent editions, fourteen in all.

Uncivil Disobedienceexamines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people. Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a \"bottom-up\" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law. Uncivil Disobediencecalls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.

For many, constitutional law changed because the Court interpreted the Second Amendment in accordance with the understandings of the Americans who ratified it: District of Columbia v. Heller marks the \"Triumph of Originalism.\" Others saw the case very differently, observing that the Court had interpreted the Second Amendment in accordance with the convictions of the twentieth-century gun-rights movement and so had demonstrated the ascendancy of the living Constitution. Part I of this article begins by examining the temporal locus of authority in the Heller opinion itself. Part II examines chapters of American constitutional history not discussed in Heller -- debates about the Second Amendment that transpired in the shadow of Brown v. Board of Education. In analyzing the conflict leading up to Heller, Part III provides a positive and interpretive account of how the boundary between constitutional law and constitutional politics has been negotiated in recent decades.

District of Columbia v. Heller is the most explicitly and self-consciously originalist opinion in the history of the Supreme Court. But there is a radically different reading of Heller. The constitutional text is ambiguous, and many historians believe that the Second Amendment does not, in fact, create a right to use guns for nonmilitary purposes. In their view, the Court's reading is untrue to the relevant materials. On another view, Heller is more properly characterized as a rerun of the minimalist ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut. This article contends that the latter view is largely correct, and that Heller will, in the fullness of time, be seen as embracing a kind of Second Amendment minimalism. Notwithstanding the Court's preoccupation with constitutional text and history, Heller cannot be adequately understood as an effort to channel the document's original public meaning.

[...] Justice Scalia's citation in footnote twenty-seven to United States v. Carotene Products(TM) is illuminating on this point. According to Henigan, the NRA's core strategy is to keep gun owners in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety about gun confiscation.

4 One example of a display-focused Establishment approach is the 1980 case Stone v. Graham.5 In Stone, the Supreme Court held that Kentucky could not post the Ten Commandments on the walls of its public school classrooms.6 Although Stone also held that the legislature did not have a valid secular, or nonreligious, purpose for posting the Ten Commandments, the short opinion relied principally on the content of the display as prima facie evidence of the lack of such a purpose.7 The strength of a display-focused approach is that it can offer a basis for clear guidelines to public officials because it emphasizes the physical characteristics, placement, and content of the display. If the Court does revisit this issue, it may conclude, like Justice Stevens, that the Framers intended the term \"religion\" in the Establishment Clause to refer only to various denominations of Christianity.175 In Van Orden, Justice Stevens argued in his dissent that, in light of the alleged narrowness of the Framers' views, the Court should not be bound by their interpretation and should instead rely on the broad principle of neutrality that, in his view, includes neutrality between religion and nonreligion.176 On the other hand, many scholars have argued that a principle that permits the government to favor religion generally is the only principle that can make sense of longstanding practices, including legislative prayers and the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Discusses the US gun control movement's strategy shift toward more a incrementalist approach in light of the upcoming presidential election & Democratic control of Congress. Adapted from the source document.

The rifled musket was, indeed, a game-changer in the American Revolution, even if it was not quite as decisive as some have made it out to be. American gunsmiths were not the first to cut grooves into the barrel of a musket, thus putting spin to the lead ball it shot. German gunsmiths were the first to employ the technique. German immigrants brought it with them to the New World and made the refinements and improvements that became the Pennsylvania long rifle and so famously knocked General Simon Fraser out of the saddle at Saratoga and, a few years later, dropped rank after rank of British troops carrying smoothbores that left them outranged and vulnerable to Andrew Jackson's men at New Orleans. Not many years after the American Revolution, firearms began to be produced in mass, on assembly lines. It was here that Eli Whitney refined and realized his breakthrough idea of manufacturing interchangeable parts.

Take Alan Gottlieb, founder and president of the Second Amendment Foundation, which began backing Gura's various gun lawsuits after Heller. Since founding the SAF in 1974, Gottlieb has been hosting academic conferences, supporting legal scholars and historians, and filing carefully targeted lawsuits in defense of gun rights.

The district is not a state but a federal enclave under direct control of Congress (though it has its own government with home-rule leeway), so lawyers could sidestep the contentious and still-unsolved issue of whether the Second Amendment applied to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, which stipulates that \"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.\" The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.