Professors to debate intentions, origins of Second Amendment

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News Staff

Two professors with distinct views on gun control and the intentions of the Second Amendment will be the featured speakers at the annual Harold and Margaret Rorschach lecture in American Legal-Constitutional History at 7 p.m. Dec. 5 in Sewall Hall, room 301.

Sanford V. Levinson, the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and Professor of Government at The University of Texas School of Law, and Jack Rakove, the Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, will argue about the origins of the Second Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights that was added to the Constitution in 1789-91.

Levinson said the Second Amendment was created because people believed there was a widespread availability of guns and guns provided an important way of protecting their liberty against the potential tyranny of government. Rakove presents a different analysis and focuses on the specific views of the Federalists who controlled Congress at the time of the initiation of the Bill of Rights.

”I don’t necessarily disagree with his specific analysis, but we draw different conclusions from the overall historical record,” Levinson said.

A scholar of constitutional law, Levinson teaches and writes about professional responsibility, jurisprudence and political theory. Rakove will challenge the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own arms or be resistant to government regulation. His talk focuses on the ”history of the drafting of the amendment and the way in which its framers were likely to have thought about ‘the well regulated militia’ with whom the right to keep and bear arms is explicitly linked.”

Rakove won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his book, ”Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution.” He teaches and writes about early American history and the origins and interpretation of the Constitution.

”One indication about the presence or absence of true scholarship, especially when a highly controversial public policy is under scrutiny, is a researcher’s commitment not to prejudge where digging into the past will take him/her,” said Harold Hyman, the William P. Hobby Professor Emeritus of History. ”Few present issues generate as much heat as gun control. Professors Levinson and Rakove exploit both historical and legal-constitutional research on gun control but come to notably differing conclusions.”