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INTRODUCTION
More than two hundred years after the publication of his influential edition of Blackstone 's Commentaries, St. George Tucker, the distinguished Jeffersonian jurist, is at the center of controversy. Gun-rights advocates claim Tucker as their spiritual forebear, but opponents of this view argue that Tucker's interpretation of the Second Amendment1 can not be pressed into service in the modern gun debate without doing great violence to his thinking. The stakes in this intellectual debate have been raised in the wake of the Supreme Court's historic decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.2 In that decision, two very different interpretations of Tucker's views of the Second Amendment were set out. Justice Scalia adopted the gun-rights view of Tucker and Justice Stevens took the opposing view. One of the central points of contention in this modern debate over Tucker arises from the learned judge's earliest discussion of the Second Amendment in his unpublished law lectures.3
In his essay on Tucker's lectures, David Hardy claims that Tucker believed that the Second Amendment enshrined a private right of individual self-defense in the Constitution.4 This individual-rights view of the Second Amendment was recently affirmed in Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Heller? Although one might have expected gun-rights advocates to accept their victory graciously, Hardy and others have been quite critical of the Heller dissents.6 In particular, Hardy takes issue with Justice Stevens's use of a passage from Tucker's law lectures.7 Tucker argues in that text that the Second Amendment was adopted by the First Congress in response to fears about federal military power. In an article in a special issue of the William and Mary Law Review commemorating Tucker's Blackstone, I argued that this passage sheds new light on the meaning of his description of the Second Amendment as the "palladium of liberty."8 Hardy disagrees, but his argument is unconvincing. He correctly notes that this phrase appears in both the law lectures and Tucker's published View of the Constitution.9 The real questions, however, are what did Tucker mean when he described the Second Amendment as the "palladium of liberty," and how does this passage relate to the one quoted by Stevens?10 Curiously, Hardy does not include the passage cited by Stevens in his article. But if one compares...