Insurrection and Assembly: Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt
By Mike Dorf In District of Columbia v. Heller , Justice Scalia, writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, identified self-defense as "the core lawful purpose" of the arms that the People are entitled to keep and bear in their individual capacities. The ruling thus vindicated an individual right view of the Second Amendment, but not the individual right for which many gun enthusiasts had long agitated. They had argued that the right to keep and bear arms may have been incidentally useful for self-defense but that its core purpose was insurrection. Although I am on record as expressing doubt about the historical basis for any individual right view of the Second Amendment, I would say that there is better historical evidence for the insurrectionist view than for the self-defense view. Most prominent is Madison's Federalist No. 46 . In the course of explaining why the People ought not to fear an overreaching federal government, Madison argues that th