Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 21.0

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

13 

Opinion of the Court 

the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the state con-
stitutions in effect when that Amendment was ratified (at
least 22 of the 37 States protected the right to keep and bear
arms),  federal  laws  enacted  during  the  same  period,  and
other relevant historical evidence.  561 U. S., at 767–777. 
Only then did the opinion conclude that “the Framers and
ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to
keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights nec-
essary to our system of ordered liberty.”  Id., at 778; see also 
id., at 822–850 (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concur-
ring in judgment) (surveying history and reaching the same
result under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Im-
munities Clause). 

Timbs  and  McDonald  concerned  the  question  whether
the  Fourteenth  Amendment  protects  rights  that  are  ex-
pressly set out in the Bill of Rights, and it would be anom-
alous if similar historical support were not required when a
putative right is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitu-
tion.  Thus, in Glucksberg, which held that the Due Process 
Clause does not confer a right to assisted suicide, the Court 
surveyed more than 700 years of “Anglo-American common 
law tradition,” 521 U. S., at 711, and made clear that a fun-
damental right must be “objectively, deeply rooted in this
Nation’s history and tradition,” id., at 720–721. 

Historical  inquiries  of  this  nature  are  essential  when-
ever we are asked to recognize a new component of the “lib-
erty” protected by the Due Process Clause because the term 
“liberty” alone provides little guidance.  “Liberty” is a capa-
cious term.  As Lincoln once said: “We all declare for Lib-
erty;  but  in  using  the  same  word  we  do  not  all  mean  the
same  thing.”20    In  a  well-known  essay,  Isaiah  Berlin  re-
ported that “[h]istorians of ideas” had cataloged more than 

—————— 

20 Address at Sanitary Fair at Baltimore, Md. (Apr. 18, 1864), reprinted 

in 7 The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 301 (R. Basler ed. 1953).