Malcolm Gladwell
speaker
3,484 appearances
51 recordings
16 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard today
Malcolm Gladwell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 22 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 4.
Appearances
In its entire history, through the early years of the twenty first century, only a handful of Second Amendment cases had ever come before the court.
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And they concerned narrow and tangential issues, like whether Americans had the right to carry a sought off shotgun in public.
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The first amendment
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which guarantees the right to free speech, or the fourteenth Amendment, which grants all Americans equal protection under the law, raised the kinds of questions that commanded the Supreme Court's time.
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The Second Amendment was an afterthought.
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All of that changed, however, when in two thousand eight, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case called District of Columbia V Heller.
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It involved a police officer in Washington DC named Dick Heller, who thought he should be able to keep his handgun at home, just as he was able to keep a handgun on him while he was on duty.
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Under DC law, however, personal handgun ownership was forbidden, denied a gun, Heller sued.
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saying that DC's law violated the Second Amendment, and the case rose all the way to the Supreme Court.
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Of course, if the United States had a version of Mexico's Article ten in its Constitution, deciding District of Columbia V.
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Heller would have been straightforward.
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Was the district's law permissible, under the authority given to the government, to limit the cases, conditions,
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Requirements and places where guns are allowed.
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Plainly, it was.
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But the Second Amendment is not Mexico's Article ten.
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It is an initial being clause attached awkwardly to an operative clause like a top hat on an elephant.
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And in order to figure out whether Heller's Second Amendment rights were violated, the court first had to figure out what the Second Amendment meant.
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In other words, before they could be jurists, the Supreme Court justices had to be grimmarians.
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So it was that on Tuesday, march eighteenth, two thousand eight, the US Supreme Court assembled to hear this most consequential of cases imagined scene.
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The justices are seated in a row behind a long, curved mahogany table in the court's central chamber, an imposing room in the grand neoclassical revival style.
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Showing 161–180 of 3,484 · page 9 of 175
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