Stephen Halbrook | 11.26.2024 8:55 PM

"Applying the Text and History Methodology to Looming Second Amendment Battles After Rahimi" was the topic of a session on November 16 at the Federalist Society's 2024 National Lawyers Convention. You can listen to the remarks here.

The moderator was Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, author of the delightful book The People's Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him. The panel featured three leading voices in the Second Amendment space.

Speaker Mark W. Smith is a Senior Fellow at the Ave Maria School of Law and Host of the Four Boxes Diner Second Amendment Channel. (That refers to the four boxes of American liberty, the soap box, ballot box, jury box, and cartridge box.)

Smith focused on the text first-history second approach applied by the Supreme Court in Heller and elaborated in Bruen. As the Supreme Court has now taught in some detail in both Bruen and Rahimi, the historical work of understanding the Second Amendment involves examining laws that impacted the right to keep and bear arms historically and asking both "how" and "why" those laws limited the right. Then, as Rahimi makes clear, the question is whether the "principle"........

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