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26  NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSN., INC. v. BRUEN 

Opinion of the Court 

Fourteenth in 1868.  Historical evidence that long predates
either date may not illuminate the scope of the right if lin-
guistic  or  legal  conventions  changed  in  the  intervening 
years.  It is one thing for courts to “reac[h] back to the 14th
century” for English practices that “prevailed up to the ‘pe-
riod immediately before and after the framing of the Con-
stitution.’ ”  Sprint Communications Co. v. APCC Services, 
Inc., 554 U. S. 269, 311 (2008) (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting).  
It is quite another to rely on an “ancient” practice that had 
become “obsolete in England at the time of the adoption of
the Constitution” and never “was acted upon or accepted in
the colonies.”  Dimick v. Schiedt, 293 U. S. 474, 477 (1935). 
As  with  historical  evidence  generally,  courts  must  be
careful  when  assessing  evidence  concerning  English 
common-law rights.  The common law, of course, developed 
over time.  Associated Gen. Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Car-
penters, 459 U. S. 519, 533, n. 28 (1983); see also Rogers v. 
Tennessee, 532 U. S. 451, 461 (2001).  And English common-
law practices and understandings at any given time in his-
tory cannot be indiscriminately attributed to the Framers 
of  our  own  Constitution.  Even  “the  words  of  Magna 
Charta”—foundational as they were to the rights of Amer-
ica’s  forefathers—“stood  for  very  different  things  at  the
time of the separation of the American Colonies from what 
they  represented  originally”  in  1215.  Hurtado  v.  Califor-
nia, 110 U. S. 516, 529 (1884).  Sometimes, in interpreting 
our own Constitution, “it [is] better not to go too far back 
into antiquity for the best securities of our liberties,” Funk 
v. United States, 290 U. S. 371, 382 (1933), unless evidence 
shows that medieval law survived to become our Founders’ 
law.  A  long,  unbroken  line  of  common-law  precedent 
stretching from Bracton to Blackstone is far more likely to
be part of our law than a short-lived, 14th-century English
practice.

Similarly, we must also guard against giving postenact-
ment history more weight than it can rightly bear.  It is true