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6 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER 

Opinion of the Court 

Three provisions of the Constitution refer to “the people” 
in  a  context  other  than  “rights”—the  famous  preamble 
(“We the people”), §2 of Article I (providing that “the peo­
ple”  will  choose  members  of  the  House),  and  the  Tenth 
Amendment  (providing  that  those  powers  not  given  the
Federal  Government  remain  with  “the  States”  or  “the 
people”).  Those  provisions  arguably  refer  to  “the  people” 
acting  collectively—but  they  deal  with  the  exercise  or 
reservation  of  powers,  not  rights.      Nowhere  else  in  the 
Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer
to anything other than an individual right.6 

What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitu­
tion  that  mention  “the  people,”  the  term  unambiguously 
refers  to  all  members  of  the  political  community,  not  an
unspecified  subset.  As  we  said  in  United  States  v.  Ver-
dugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 265 (1990): 

“ ‘[T]he  people’  seems  to  have  been  a  term  of  art  em­
ployed  in  select  parts  of  the  Constitution. . . .  [Its 
uses]  sugges[t]  that  ‘the  people’  protected  by  the 

—————— 

in a defined militia.  And JUSTICE STEVENS is dead wrong to think that
the  right  to  petition  is  “primarily  collective  in  nature.”    Ibid.  See 
McDonald v. Smith,  472  U. S.  479,  482–484  (1985)  (describing  histori­
cal origins of right to petition). 

6 If we look to other founding-era documents, we find that some state
constitutions  used  the  term  “the  people”  to  refer  to  the  people  collec­
tively,  in  contrast  to  “citizen,”  which  was  used  to  invoke  individual
rights.    See  Heyman,  Natural  Rights  and  the  Second  Amendment,  in
The  Second  Amendment  in  Law  and  History  179,  193–195  (C.  Bogus
ed.  2000)  (hereinafter  Bogus).    But  that  usage  was  not  remotely  uni­
form.  See,  e.g.,  N. C.  Declaration  of  Rights  §XIV  (1776),  in  5  The 
Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic 
Laws 2787, 2788 (F. Thorpe ed. 1909) (hereinafter Thorpe) (jury trial);
Md.  Declaration  of  Rights  §XVIII  (1776),  in  3   id.,  at  1686,  1688  (vici­
nage requirement); Vt. Declaration of Rights ch. 1, §XI (1777), in 6  id., 
at  3737,  3741  (searches  and  seizures);    Pa.  Declaration  of  Rights  §XII 
(1776), in 5 id., at 3081, 3083 (free speech).  And, most importantly, it
was clearly not the terminology used in the Federal Constitution, given 
the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments.