United States · Book or treatise
Story’s concise constitutional commentary, with the disarmament passage quoted in Heller and its surrounding discussion of militia discipline.
Requested text available. Collection target: Boston 1840 edition
Joseph Story · 1840
Digitized by Google Books and made available through the Internet Archive. The repository does not identify the contributing library. Original source marks and identification pages are retained. Whole-volume repository facsimile with preliminary leaves, main text, appendix, glossary, index through printed 372, and terminal blank leaves. The title page identifies this copy as the Boston 1840 edition published by Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb. Heller describes the work as published in 1840 but cites a 1986 reprint. The quoted sentence and section are verified here in the 1840 text, not in the exact 1986 reprint. Catalog records identify the 1986 Regnery Gateway bicentennial edition as a reprint of the 1859 Harper edition, with a foreword by Edwin Meese III. That catalog identification does not establish that this was the particular 1986 copy used by the Court. Its title page and section 450 have not been inspected. Section 450 is on printed page 264, PDF page 279. Section 451 begins on that page and continues on printed page 265, PDF page 280. Preserve the discussion of militia discipline when explaining the quoted warning. The work was first published 49 years after the Second Amendment was ratified. It is postratification commentary, not a contemporaneous record of the 1791 debates. The original PDF is predominantly image-only. Search text comes from the Internet Archive’s separate OCR derivative of the same scan. OCR contains recognition errors, including a misread page 264 header, and must not be used as a substitute for the image when quoting.
Open reader → Download this PDF
Antonin Scalia · Opinion of the Court
District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 608–09 (2008).
Scalia quotes Story’s warning that disarming the people enables tyranny, in a discussion rejecting an interpretation confined to organized militia service. The next section explains the militia’s protective role and warns against declining militia discipline.
The title page identifies this copy as the Boston 1840 edition published by Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb. Heller describes the work as published in 1840 but cites a 1986 reprint. The quoted sentence and section are verified here in the 1840 text, not in the exact 1986 reprint.
Catalog records identify the 1986 Regnery Gateway bicentennial edition as a reprint of the 1859 Harper edition, with a foreword by Edwin Meese III. That catalog identification does not establish that this was the particular 1986 copy used by the Court. Its title page and section 450 have not been inspected.
Section 450 is on printed page 264, PDF page 279. Section 451 begins on that page and continues on printed page 265, PDF page 280. Preserve the discussion of militia discipline when explaining the quoted warning.
The work was first published 49 years after the Second Amendment was ratified. It is postratification commentary, not a contemporaneous record of the 1791 debates.
The original PDF is predominantly image-only. Search text comes from the Internet Archive’s separate OCR derivative of the same scan. OCR contains recognition errors, including a misread page 264 header, and must not be used as a substitute for the image when quoting.