New Law School Textbook on the Second Amendment and Firearms Laws

[Bubbles]

Wait a danged second, up until a few days ago there was no law school textbook or teaching aids at all regarding the Second Amendment and firearms laws? Really? Attorneys learned nothing about it in their coursework?

http://volokh.com/2012/05/15/new-textbook-firearms-law-and-the-second-amendment-regulation-rights-and-policy/
The first law school textbook on the Second Amendment is now available...

 

[mljdeckard]

Is there a law school actually teaching the class?

 

[Rmeju]

FWIW, when I started school in 2009, we couldn't buy used Con Law books partly because of the changes created by Heller (which was one of the first cases we studied) meant we had to buy new ones.

My school didn't offer a 2A course, unfortunately, but we definitely hit the gun cases in both Con Law I and Con Law II.

I just graduated last weekend, so I can speak for the current course work at the U of MN law school.

RmeJu

 

[armoredman]

Congrats, sir.

 

[Cosmoline]

I well remember the instruction I received in Constitutional Law regarding the Second Amendment back in 1996. It came from now-appellate judge David Schuman, but it was typical of what you might hear from most law profs. He spent about two minutes on it, summarizing very briefly the then-accepted collective right theory, and basically dismissed it as having no importance whatsoever to lawyers.

I don't want to pick on my little liberal prof. He was actually fantastic on most subjects, and gave me one of my only A+ grades in law school. His attitude was absolutely typical. Lawyers in general are left-of-center and law profs are much further left than average. There's usually one or two token conservatives in the faculty, but I believe an unofficial quota must be in place. It isn't so much a conspiracy as a natural result of like minds preferring to hire other like minds.

I hope there are 2A courses on offer. I couldn't even have imagined such a thing back in my day.

 

[Frank Ettin]

When I took Con Law in 1973, we didn't touch on the Second Amendment at all. It was the forgotten Amendment everyone tried to ignore. And at that time, there was very little if any scholarship on it. I think Don Kates' article something like 20 years ago was one of the first real attempts to deal with the Second Amendment seriously.

All of this is very nicely addressed in Adam Winkler's book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

 

[gunlaw]

My law school instruction on the 2nd ammendment came during civil procedure. A student made an anti gun comment to which the professor responded "it's a constitional right. Get over it".That student was pretty quiet for the rest of the semester.

 

[cbrgator]

There was no 2A course at my law school either, and we spent one day on Heller in each of my Con Law I and II courses. In all fairness though, there really isn't enough material to make a full course out of it... not yet. It took 50-60 years for the SCOTUS to establish the scope and boundaries of the 1A, and there is a large body of 1A jurisprudence.

2A jurisprudence is in its nascent stages, and I think it will be a while before we there is enough on the subject at the Supreme Court level to offer such a class.

Having said that, I don't think my law school would offer the 2A as a course, even after 100 published Supreme Court decisions... It's far too liberal a faculty.

 

[Sebastian the Ibis]

When I took Con law in 2006 the 2A was not taught. I hosted Alan Gura at the law school in 2007-2008, and couldn't find a professor anywhere who would debate him. Now Heller/McDonald are an integral part of Con-law jurisprudence, if professors want to admit it or not.

 

[MagnumDweeb]

I graduated back in 2009 and we never touched self-defense in Con-Law, granted my professor was an Obama boy but I don't think it was particularly a big deal. My criminal law professor spent about thirty minutes on in it and he was a retired federal judge (who had grown up in Montana) and it mostly about self-defense and the can of worms one could open up for themselves legally if they ever shot someone in self-defense.

It's going to get interesting over the next twenty years in the legal field. Self-Defense is now the norm in most states, gun ownership support is swinging in our favor, women make up nearly sixty percent of all law school graduates, and we've had a few big SCOTUS cases.

It's all starting to change, a course involving the 2a would be a Mickey Mouse course much like my Poverty and the Law course (taught by a wonderful old professor who tried to teach the old Soviet block kids capitalism at one point in his career).

 

[danez71]

If anyone would like to donate this book to me... just PM me please.

I promise to make good use of it.