"Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

December 15, 1791, after two years and six months of debate, the Virginia General Assembly ratified the Bill of Rights, adding, among other things, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the secu­rity of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

And for the next two centuries, nothing really hap­pened with the Second Amendment.

The primary issue that remains before courts begin to strike down unconstitutional state and local firearms laws is "Incorporation." This is the legal term for applying our rights against the Federal govern­ment, including those that are spelled out in the Bill of Rights as well as those that have not been enu­merated against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment. With the Supreme Court recently decid­ing to review McDonald v. Chicago, some explana­tion of the history and original popular understanding of the 14th Amendment is important context as the case moves to oral argument in February 2010 with a decision expected in late June 2010.

In an earlier post explaining the current split among federal circuit courts over whether the Second Amendment applies to the states, we noted that Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, participated in Maloney v. Cuomo, the first post-Heller case to examine Second Amendment incorporation. And she voted against incorporation, i.e., against the Second Amendment providing any protection to individuals from state and local restrictions on the right to keep an bear arms. Well, as we get further into Judge Sotomayor’s record, we find this was not the first time the judge addressed gun rights.