The Georgetown University Center for the Constitution, which leads programming on constitutional law at the Georgetown University Law Center, awarded an annual book prize to two law professors for their 2023 book on the Second Amendment.
Robert Cottrol (LAW ’84), a law, history and sociology professor at the George Washington University, and Brannon Denning, a law professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., each received the Thomas M. Cooley book prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of constitutional law. The award recognizes Cottrol and Denning’s book, titled “To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment,” with a $50,000 prize.
Randy Barnett, the director of the center, said the award seeks to recognize specialized research on the Constitution.
“The purpose of the prize is to call public attention to books that we think deserve that attention, even if they may or may not get it otherwise,” Barnett told The Hoya. “So sometimes these books are themselves prominent, but sometimes they’re more obscure because the purpose of the prize is both to honor the contribution, but also to call attention to it.”
Barnett said that “To Trust the People with Arms” is significant because it tells a complete history of the legal discourse surrounding the Second Amendment.
“It is the first comprehensive intellectual history of how the right to keep and bear arms had been thought of by Americans and dealt with by the Supreme Court since our founding,” Barnett said. “It’s a book that describes the history of how the Second Amendment has been thought about in the United States and how it has been treated by the courts, including by the Supreme Court. And that made its contribution unique.”
Cottrol said the book traces the history of the right to bear arms in the United States, from the institution of the Second Amendment through the twenty-first century.
“We initially envisioned doing the book as one that would take us from the drafting of the Second Amendment and its adoption in 1791 to District of Columbia v. Heller, which is the first time the court unambiguously held that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to own firearms for self-defense,” Cottrol told The Hoya.
Denning and Cottrol divided their work, with Cottrol, a legal historian, covering the history of guns in United States society while Denning wrote about the implications of court cases that affect gun rights.
Denning said he hopes the book will encourage individuals in the United States to take a deeper interest in the legal dialogue surrounding the Second Amendment.
“I like to think that the book could provide an introduction, provide historical background and introduction to the debate itself and a description of how the court resolved it,” Denning told The Hoya. “And if anybody wants to do a deeper dive, there are lots and lots of footnotes so they can go dig out sources and deepen their understanding if they’re so inclined.”
Cottrol said he remains optimistic that the dialogue surrounding support for the right to bear arms will shift, allowing for common-sense gun control.
“I think what I’m looking towards is the idea that not all sorts of regulation and gun control are that weigh station on the way to prohibition,” Cottrol said. “And if the courts make clear that that cannot happen, then we can talk about various kinds of means or measures that we might adopt to better prevent dangerous people from getting access to guns.”
Denning said he is honored to receive this recognition for his scholarship.
“It’s almost indescribable,” Denning said. “If you look at the previous recipients, many of them are people that I have long admired in the field of constitutional law and constitutional scholarship. And I like what it means for my law school, that people might look and say, ‘Where is Samford University? What’s the Cumberland School of Law?’”
