In 2007, for the first time in nearly seventy years, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving the Second Amendment. The resulting decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first time the Court declared a firearms restriction to be unconstitutional on the basis of the Second Amendment. It was followed two years later by a similar decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago, and in 2022, the Court further expanded its support for Second Amendment right...

First Published in 1993. This volume is a collection of legal and historical material of the second amendment that includes court cases and decisions, law review articles and gives a balanced view of both sides of the debate.

Winner: Langum PrizeBefore 1954, both law and custom mandated strict racial segregation throughout much of the nation. That began to change with Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that overturned the pernicious “separate but equal” doctrine. In declaring that legally mandated school segregation was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court played a critical role in helping to dismantle America’s own version of apartheid, Jim Crow.This new...

Students of American history know of the law’s critical role in systematizing a racial hierarchy in the United States. Showing that this history is best appreciated in a comparative perspective, The Long, Lingering Shadow looks at the parallel legal histories of race relations in the United States, Brazil, and Spanish America. Robert J. Cottrol takes the reader on a journey from the origins of New World slavery in colonial Latin America to current debates and litigation over affir...

Stephen Halbrook's groundbreaking study of freed slaves and the right to bear arms in the aftermath of the Civil War, cited in Supreme Court cases, now with a new foreword by Robert J. Cottrol.What did it mean to take civil rights seriously—especially the "right to bear arms"—in the years following the abolition of slavery? By quoting legislative debates, Congressional hearings on Ku Klux Klan violence, and newspapers and law books of the time, constitutional schol...