David Kopel points out a new article by David Hardy appearing in the Northwestern Law Review that discovers an error in a 2006 article by Saul Cornell advocating a collectivist interpretation of the Second Amendment. Cornell’s article cited an 18th century legal treatise in support of the idea that the Second Amendment is about state militias. However, Cornell’s article failed to notice that the passage it cited regarded the Article 1 grant of militia powers to Congress, not to the Second Amendment. (Not too surprisingly, the section on militas in Article 1 is about militias.)
This is interesting, because Justice Stevens uncritically cited Cornell’s erroneous article in his Heller dissent (in footnote 32) to buttress his argument for a collectivist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Pretty shoddy work by Stevens’s staff. With the responsibility for authoritative interpretation of the US Constitution, you might hope that Supreme Court justices would verify their sources. (ASIDE: Lest I be accused of the same error, let me admit that I have not read Cornell’s article, as it does not appear to be available free on the Internet. But then, I’m not on the Supreme Court.)
Internet Scofflaw 