Date Thesis Awarded
4-2015
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Government
Advisor
Joel Schwartz
Committee Members
Jackson Sasser
Chinua Thelwell
Abstract
The Second Amendment is traditionally understood within the bounds of originalism, a method of Constitutional interpretation that calls on founding-era history as a means of ascertaining original meanings of the Constitution. Both proponents and opponents of gun regulation appeal to this history as a means of justifying their respective viewpoints – the former assumes an ‘individual right’ reading of the Amendment, while the latter maintains a ‘collective right’ interpretation. In this project, I describe the origins of the Second Amendment and its original context, affirming Saul Cornell’s ‘civic right’ interpretation, against both the individual and collective rights interpretations. I illustrate the link between the civic right and the civic republican paradigm under which the Amendment was originally understood. I posit that society has lost its civic republican elements, gradually adopting liberal individualism, and given that the Amendment was embedded specifically within the civic republican paradigm, any attempt to abstract meaning from the Amendment and apply it to a modern context breaches commitments to originalism. I ultimately propose that a serious originalist would support the repeal of the Second Amendment, given the impossibility of reconciling originalist commitments and societal paradigm shift.
Recommended Citation
Alaigh, Arvin, "Examining the Role of Cultural Paradigm Shift on Originalist Interpretation: Implications on the Second Amendment" (2015). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 231.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/231
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
