Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2011
Abstract
In her article Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller, Professor Reva Siegel argued that the Supreme Court’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller relied on originalism to enforce understandings of the Second Amendment that were forged in the late twentieth century through popular constitutionalism. In this Response, Professor Joseph Blocher argues that those understandings reappeared in McDonald v. City of Chicago, in part through the efforts of thirty-eight state attorneys general (SAGs) who filed an amicus brief urging the Court to incorporate the Second Amendment against the states. The SAGs invoked federalism, but their arguments owed more to popular constitutionalism than to the interests of the states qua states. Thus although the SAGs helped solve popular constitutionalism’s problem of institutional design, they raised new questions about their own responsibilities as representatives of the states.
Citation
Joseph Blocher, Popular Constitutionalism and the State Attorneys General, 122 Harvard Law Review Forum 108-115 (2011)
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Constitutional law, State governments--Officials and employees
Included in
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2403