The History and Politics of Second Amendment Scholarship: A Primer

The introductory Article to this Symposium reviews the history and politics of Second Amendment scholarship, beginning in 1960, when the first article endorsing the individual right model was published, challenging what had previously been the accepted view that the Second Amendment grants only a collective right to keep and bear arms within the government-organized militia. Bogus describes how gun rights organizations embarked on a bootstrap campaign to develop a large body of writing supporting the individual right model, much of it by lawyers directly employed by or representing gun rights organizations, and then argued that the sheer mass of this writing was significant. Bogus devotes most of this Article to critically assessing the work of the five most prominent scholars to endorse the individual right view: Sanford Levinson, Akhil Reed Amar, William Van Alstyne, Laurence H. Tribe, and Leonard W. Levy.