Divestment actions, boycotts, and blacklists aimed at chilling the exercise of a constitutional right can create a dangerous precedent.

If the Newtown killings don’t oblige legislators and courts to show courage against the gun lobby and its junk politics and to end the easy availability of weapons that are efficient killing machines, what ever will?

Ours is the only Constitution that explicitly protects “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” But the Second Amendment is anything but clear about what those Delphic words were intended to mean at the time they were enacted.

For too long, most members of the legal academy have treated the Second Amendment as the equivalent of an embarrassing relative, whose mention brings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, family members. That will no longer do.

While the Heller decision has already been deemed of great significance by the legal community, it is too soon to tell what its long term effects may be.

Levinson and Kairys discuss the 2nd Amendment ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Heller.

‘Due attention’ should be paid to text, structure, history, and precedent, but it is also important for the Supreme Court to be sensitive as well to what Justice Holmes called ‘the felt necessities of the time.’

One might think that when roughly 90 percent of the American people support enhanced background checks for people who wish to purchase firearms, there would be a good chance that that policy preference would result in legislation.

Critics across the spectrum call the American political system dysfunctional, even pathological. What they don’t mention, though, is the role of the Constitution itself in generating the pathology.