The General-Law Right to Bear Arms

William Baude* & Robert Leider**

In this Article, we argue that Bruen‘s intended methodological shift has been widely misunderstood by the bench and bar. This has led to confusion and misapplication in the lower courts, as well as much scholarly criticism of the test that is, we think, misdirected. As we will explain, Bruen calls for a form of legal originalism, applying a classical view of fundamental rights as a form of unwritten customary law. This is consistent with the text and history of the Constitution and leads to results that are less mechanical and more sensible than many lower courts have thought. Understanding Bruen‘s methodology requires three basic legal concepts: original-law originalism, constitutionalization of preexisting rights, and the general law.

Original-law originalism maintains that our law today is a form of originalism. Like all forms of originalism, this looks to the past for evidence of today’s constitutional law. Original-law originalism focuses more specifically on the law of the past. It holds that our law today is “the Founders’ law, as it’s been lawfully changed.” This means that our law must trace a legal pedigree to the law of the Founding and its own rules of legal change.

The constitutionalization of a preexisting right means that sometimes, perhaps often, the Constitution’s reference to a legal right must be understood by learning the historical customary law that defined and governed the right before its codification. Because the Constitution was not creating or defining these terms for the first time, but rather using the legal terminology and legal infrastructure of the day, one cannot entirely understand these rights just by parsing their literal meaning. The “Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” to take a simple example, should be understood in light of centuries of law about the writ, not only by using a Latin-English dictionary to learn that “habeas” means “you have” and “corpus” means “the body.” But the same may be true for many less simple examples, ranging from the right to due process, to the right to freedom of speech, to (indeed) the right to keep and bear arms.

The general-law approach to rights means that the scope of these preexisting rights was sometimes defined by unwritten law that was neither state common law nor federal common law. Rather the general law—made famous by Justice Story’s opinion about commercial law in Swift v. Tyson, and then made infamous by Justice Brandeis’s opinion in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins—was a form of common law shared among Anglo-American jurisdictions, which could be expounded by any of them, but controlled by none of them. The general-law approach applied not just to the law merchant or the law of torts, but to the fundamental rights of citizenship, and was an important part of the law of the Founding, as well as the original meaning of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

These three legal concepts overlap and reinforce one another in important ways. The constitutionalization of preexisting rights means that to understand the Constitution, we must understand the Constitution’s legal background. Original-law originalism tells us that we are bound by that original meaning of the Constitution, including the surrounding law, not just the semantic meanings of the words. And the general-law approach tells us what kind of surrounding law that was, and how it might be applied over time to those bound by the Founders’ law today. While much of this apparatus was operating “under the hood” in Bruen, it shows what the Court was trying to say, and how the right to keep and bear arms should work today.

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© 2024 William Baude & Robert Leider.  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 authors, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice.

*Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.

**Assistant Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University.  The authors thank Eric Claeys, Adam Mossoff, Haley Proctor, and Richard Re for helpful comments on this draft, as well as the participants at a workshop at the George Washington University Law School.  Will Horvath, James Marmaduke, and Georgios Sarris provided helpful research assistance.