Dennis Baron, Carl Bogus, James Phillips, & Josh Blackman

"The Meaning of 'Keep and Bear Arms'"

Tuesday, January 12th

12:15 pm

If you need an accommodation in order to participate in this event, please email Tamara Skinner at tskinner@uchicago.edu.

Dennis Baron is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. Professor Baron interested in language and the law, has consulted in a number of legal cases, and was asked by the Washington, DC, attorney general to write "the Linguists' Brief," presenting a grammatical and semantic analysis of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court case Heller v. District of Columbia. That amicus brief was cited in oral argument and in both the majority and minority opinions.

Carl Bogus is a professor at Roger Williams School of Law. Professor Bogus has written extensively about political ideology, torts and products liability, and gun control and the Second Amendment. Professor Bogus is especially well known for his thesis that James Madison drafted the Second Amendment to assure his constituents in Virginia and the South generally that the federal government could not disarm the state militia, on which the South relied for slave control, as set forth in his article “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment” published by U.C. Davis Law Review.  

James Phillips is Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law. His research topics include constitutional interpretation, law and corpus linguistics, the First Amendment, Supreme Court oral argument, and empirical studies examining discrimination. Professor Phillips clerked for Justice Thomas R. Lee of the Utah Supreme court and for Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was a constitutional law fellow for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, worked in private practice focusing primarily on First Amendment issues and Supreme Court litigation, and was a nonresident fellow with Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center.

Josh Blackman, is a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. Professor Blackman specializes in constitutional law, the United States Supreme Court, and the intersection of law and technology. He is the author of three books: Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (2013), Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know (2019). Professor Blackman has twice testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the constitutionality of executive action on immigration and health care. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

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