Wine & Cheese Reception: 6:30 pm. Program: 7:00 pm
Admission: $15 • $10 for Institute Members Reserve Tickets
$35 Special Admission includes one copy of Securing Civil Rights • $30 Independent Institute Members
Location: The Independent Institute Conference Center, 100 Swan Way, Oakland, CA 94621-1428
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Research Fellow at the Independent Institute who has won three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and is the author of the Independent Institute books, Securing Civil Rights, The Founders’ Second Amendment, and That Every Man Be Armed.
Professor of Constitutional Law at Lincoln Law School of San Jose and a practicing attorney specializing in civil rights cases.
In June 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling on the Second Amendment individual right to “keep and bear arms” with its Heller v. District of Columbia decision. Two years later, in June 2010, a second historic decision squeezed through the highest court in the land, incorporating the Second Amendment with the Fourteenth—the post-Civil War amendment intended in part to protect the Second Amendment rights of freed slaves. In a 5-4 vote, McDonald v. Chicago upheld the Fourteenth Amendment as the guarantor of civil rights at all levels of government, as its framers intended. Join Stephen P. Halbrook, constitutional scholar, attorney, and author of Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, which both the Heller and McDonald decisions cited, and Donald E. Kilmer, Jr., Professor of Constitutional Law and attorney at law, as they discuss the Second and Fourteenth Amendments and what it means to take the Bill of Rights seriously.
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 scholar Stephen Halbrook shows that both supporters and opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) believed that it protected all Bill of Rights guarantees—especially the Second Amendment—from infringement by the states.
From the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866 to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), Halbrook paints a vivid portrait of a political and legal system grappling with the true meaning of civil rights.
“Trusting ex-slaves to own firearms was, by any definition, the cutting edge in true belief in civil rights,” Halbrook writes. “It remains to be seen whether contemporary society will accommodate the same rights of the freedmen that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to guarantee.”
Although Halbrook concentrates on the right to keep and bear arms, he also includes a comprehensive analysis of the general topic of the relationship between the Bill of Rights and the state governments after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Cited by both the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Heller decision (2008) and the Washington Supreme Court in State of Washington v. Christopher William Sieyes (2010) as the leading account of the relationship between the Second Amendment and the states during Reconstruction, Halbrook’s insightful narrative will help a larger audience better understand why earlier generations of Americans viewed the right to bear arms as essential for securing civil rights.
