Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf
Page Number: 37.0

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

31 

Opinion of the Court 

(1888).  But this Court has long cautioned that the English 
common law “is not to be taken in all respects to be that of 
America.”  Van  Ness  v.  Pacard,  2  Pet.  137,  144  (1829)
(Story, J., for the Court); see also Wheaton v. Peters, 8 Pet. 
591, 659 (1834); Funk, 290 U. S., at 384.  Thus, “[t]he lan-
guage of the Constitution cannot be interpreted safely ex-
cept by reference to the common law and to British institu-
tions  as  they  were  when  the  instrument  was  framed  and 
adopted,” not as they existed in the Middle Ages.  Ex parte 
Grossman, 267 U. S. 87, 108–109 (1925) (emphasis added); 
see also United States v. Reid, 12 How. 361, 363 (1852). 

We  interpret  the  English  history  that  respondents  and
the United States muster in light of these interpretive prin-
ciples.  We find that history ambiguous at best and see little 
reason to think that the Framers would have thought it ap-
plicable in the New World.  It is not sufficiently probative
to defend New York’s proper-cause requirement.

To  begin,  respondents  and  their  amici  point  to  several
medieval  English  regulations  from  as  early  as  1285  that 
they say indicate a longstanding tradition of restricting the 
public  carry  of  firearms.  See  13  Edw.  1,  102.    The  most 
prominent is the 1328 Statute of Northampton (or Statute),
passed shortly after Edward II was deposed by force of arms 
and his son, Edward III, took the throne of a kingdom where
“tendency to turmoil and rebellion was everywhere appar-
ent throughout the realm.”  N. Trenholme, The Risings in 
the English Monastic Towns in 1327, 6 Am. Hist. Rev. 650,
651 (1901).  At the time, “[b]ands of malefactors, knights as
well as those of lesser degree, harried the country, commit-
ting  assaults  and  murders,”  prompted  by  a  more  general
“spirit  of  insubordination”  that  led  to  a  “decay  in  English 
national  life.”  K.  Vickers,  England  in  the  Later  Middle 
Ages 107 (1926).

The Statute of Northampton was, in part, “a product of 
. . . the acute disorder that still plagued England.”  A. Ver-
duyn,  The  Politics  of  Law  and  Order  During  the  Early