Historical Fact

Ryan C. Williams*

The growing emphasis on history as a criterion of constitutional decision-making in Supreme Court jurisprudence has raised the importance of a distinctive type of judicial fact-finding—namely, the investigation and resolution of contested questions of historical fact. Although history has always played an important role in constitutional adjudication, its primary role has traditionally been as an input to constitutional interpretation. But in cases like New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Court has increasingly demanded that factual determinations regarding the content, meaning, purposes, and effects of decisions taken in the distant past should also guide the lower courts’ application of the interpretively determined constitutional meaning to contemporary legal disputes.

The growing importance of historical-fact determinations in constitutional litigation raises significant questions about the appropriate mechanisms for historical fact-finding and the allocation of institutional authority and responsibility among the different layers of the federal judiciary. Bruen provides a useful case study in the complexities that are likely to attend this project. The Bruen Court’s guidance to lower courts emphasized techniques conventionally associated with adjudicative fact-finding, such as party presentation of evidence and allocations of burdens of proof as mechanisms to resolve epistemic uncertainty about the relevant historical facts. But the Court also signaled that the historical facts thus found might carry broad precedential effects that will bind nonparties and considered extrarecord evidence, including third-party amicus briefing and the Court’s own independent research, in discerning the facts it deemed relevant to the case before it. Bruen thus somewhat awkwardly straddles the line between assessing claims about history through conventional adjudicative fact-finding and the techniques more commonly associated with the finding of so-called “legislative” or “nonadjudicative” facts.

This Article argues that this unresolved tension in Bruen presents a challenge with which courts are likely to struggle in translating historical facts into legally operative facts and legal conclusions. An approach that emphasizes party control and adjudicative fact-finding is likely to produce significant redundancy, inefficiency, and inconsistency in application. But an approach that treats historical fact-finding as a pure question of nonadjudicative fact carries its own drawbacks, including enhancing the risk that binding precedential rules will be formulated on incomplete and potentially inaccurate understandings of the historical record. This Article examines this tension and suggests possible ways forward for lower courts tasked with implementing doctrines that hinge on historical fact-finding.

Continue reading in the print edition . . .

© 2024 Ryan C. Williams.  Individuals and nonprofit institutions may reproduce and distribute copies of this Article in any format at or below cost, for educational purposes, so long as each copy identifies the author, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice.

*Associate Professor, Boston College Law School.