Buffington on Being vs. Because: New Observations on the Syntax & Semantics of the US Constitution's Second Amendment @AlbanyLaw

Joe Buffington, Albany Law School, has published Being vs. Because: New Observations on the Syntax & Semantics of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment. Here is the abstract.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution is ambiguous due to its subordination of one clause to another without the use of an overt subordinating conjunction. Many scholars have argued that the subordination is more or less similar, if not identical, to what is seen in because-clauses. One such scholar, Karen Sullivan, has recently used corpus linguistics to conclude that the likeliest interpretation of the Second Amendment’s subordination when the Amendment was written was one of “external causation,” where the militia clause is understood as the real-world reason why the right-to-bear-arms clause is true. This essay responds to Sullivan’s significant work by presenting three synchronic differences between being-clauses and because-clauses that suggest that external causation may not be an optimal interpretation of the Amendment’s structure, after all. An alternative analysis, where the missing conjunction is modeled as a covert proform, is proposed, and consequences of the analysis are considered – in particular, I present a novel argument that the US Supreme Court’s controversial decision in District of Columbia v. Heller was, in essence, correct.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.