Re: I think Hardy has shown that this is incorrect.

[Dave Hardy]

Yep. My article Originalism and Its Tools: a Few Caveats, should appear soon in Akron L Rev Strict Scrutiny. It's on my SSRN page. That and my earlier article, showing that the congressional debates, and the key speeches by Bingham and Howard, were carried in transcript form by the major national papers. Originalism and its Tools reviews Prof. Thomas' methodology. Its problem is the limits of the technology used. He uses a keyword search of several online databases of 19th century newspapers. Those databases in turn are based on text files created by optical character recognition reading of the papers. But OCR is unreliable applied to century old fonts, on paper that has had 130 years of fading and staining, and usually reprinted from microfilm with all its scratches. Upwards of 90% of the resulting text is gibberish. A keyword search of gibberish is not going to turn up much in the way of results. -----Original Message----- From: "Joseph E. Olson" Sent: Jan 7, 2010 10:58 AM To: List Firearms Reg Cc: postHeller Subject: I think Hardy has shown that this is incorrect. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1392961    Abstract:      For over sixty years scholars have debated whether Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment "incorporated" the Bill of Rights guarantees and thus made them enforceable against the states. Recently, the debate has turned to what the state legislators might have known when they ratified the amendment. In this paper, presented at the University of San Diego Law School on January 7, George Thomas discusses the body of evidence already available and then presents new evidence gathered from a search of newspaper archives for the period 1865 to 1869. He discovered one newspaper article that clearly makes the incorporation case and three others that offer lesser degrees of support for the proposition that educated men of the era were aware that Section 1 included the Bill of Rights. But 96% of the articles that discussed "privileges" and "immunities" gave no hint of a connection with the Bill of Rights.   Discussed at http://volokh.com/2010/01/06/newspapers-and-the-fourteenth-amendment-what-did-the-american-public-know-about-section-1/     ******************************************************************* Professor Joseph Olson, J.D., LL.M.                                   o-   651-523-2142  Hamline University School of Law (MS-D2037)                    f-    651-523-2236 St. Paul, MN  55113-1235                                                 c-   612-865-7956 jol...@gw.hamline.edu                              http://law.hamline.edu/node/784

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