PREFACE.

• Author: Baade, Nicole M.

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." In this Issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy we have the privilege of publishing an Essay in which Professor Renee Lettow Lerner describes this right as most reflecting the spirit of a free people--the spirit of self-reliance and resistance to oppression. The Supreme Court too has recognized the importance of the right to keep and bear arms in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess handguns within the home, and McDonald v. City of Chicago, applying the Second Amendment to the States. The Court however has left many questions open regarding the scope of the right. The Federalist Society hosted an event called "The Second Amendment in the New Supreme Court" in January 2019 to provide guidance on a few of these remaining questions.

In addition to Professor Lerner's Essay based on her keynote address, we have the honor of presenting four Essays from the event in this Issue. In the first two, Dr. Stephen Halbrook and Jonathan Taylor debate the question: "Does the right to bear arms include a right to carry handguns in public?" In the second two, Mark Smith and Jonathan Lowy debate the question: "Are semiautomatic rifles, aka 'assault weapons,' protected by the Second Amendment?" Special thanks are due to the editors from other law schools who volunteered to stay on for another issue to edit these Essays. We could not have published this event without their exceptional work.

These Essays are followed by three excellent Articles on current legal issues. The first Article we present in this Issue, by Ryan T. Anderson, considers the cases Bostock v. Clayton County and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. EEOC currently pending before the Supreme Court. He argues that the Supreme Court should not redefine the word "sex" in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to extend to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status. Next, Professor Nicholas Kahn-Fogel takes an in-depth look at Justice Gorsuch's dissent in Carpenter v. United...