Stephen P. Halbrook argues in Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, Updated Edition that the Fourteenth Amendment was understood to protect the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment right to bear arms, from infringement by the States. Halbrook also argues that the Supreme Court did not fully understand this argument in its decisions from the 1870s until District of Columbia v. Heller.

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In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Paul A. Lombardo argues that a small, zealous faction of the eugenics movement pushed for sterilization laws by exploiting Carrie Buck in a court case (Buck v. Bell) designed to set a precedent for the constitutionality of sterilization laws and protect practicing members of the eugenics community from prosecution. Lombardo successfully uses the narrative of the 1927 Buck v. Bell case to tie together different arguments and topics relating to the legal, political, and scientific (or lack of scientific) history of the eugenics movement and then shifts from the story of Buck v. Bell to its implications in current legal history. Continue reading

Akhil Reed Amar tries to do a lot of things in his most recent book The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era. He acknowledges his ambitious goals in his lengthy introduction where he writes that he is offering three books in one: a book on constitutional substance, a book on constitutional method, and a book on constitutional time. Amar explains that he wants to help readers understand the Constitution by presenting a survey of contemporary constitutional law, a lesson in how to do constitutional law, and a reflection in the tensions between constitutionalism and journalism. Continue reading