Mr. Louis Craco's Summer, 1997 article on the meaning of the Second Amendment was both thought provoking and in many particulars quite...correct. It does at first glance seem unreasonable, given the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment, to lump it in with other, differently phrased articles contained in the Bill of Rights. The unique extra verbiage - which cannot be meaningless gloss - that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." sets the Second Amendment apart from the others, for no other article within the Bill of Rights contains its own internal justification.

This wording - and there is no reasonable way around it - also suggests through the use of the term Militia, the entire population of able bodied adult males of an age to bear arms and organized or organizable into groups of combatants, that the right to keep and bear arms is for a collective purpose.[1]

To accept that the Second Amendment serves a collective purpose, however, is not to concede that it is merely a collective right. Consider, for example, the First Amendment, or rather those clauses of it concerned with freedom of speech and of the press. These rights are exercised individually, by newspapers, other media, the individual members of their staffs, and individual citizens. Its purpose, on the other hand, is to secure the liberty of the collective by giving widespread airing to even unpopular or anti-governmental views.

There is, therefore, no obvious contradiction between the exercise of an individual right and the service of a collective purpose. As with freedom of speech and of the press...or of other guaranteed liberties - free assembly, freedom of conscience through freedom of religion, the right to have one's home free of spies in uniform, the one can serve the other quite handily: individual freedoms, freely exercised, preserving the freedom of the group and of each member in it.

It is not necessary, however, to claim that the right to keep and bear arms is individual in order still to maintain that the Federal Government has no legal power to infringe it. While legislative history surrounding the framing of the Constitution may be considered either murky, partisan, non-existent, or of limited utility, the history of the nation is plain enough. At the time of the drafting of the Constitution we had but recently emerged from a great revolutionary, and effectively also a civil, war. Even after that revolution, and still faced with a world beyond our borders both powerful and hostile, in some cases implacably so, the Thirteen Colonies refused to set up a true nation, adopting instead the Articles of Confederation.

Despite the failure of the Confederation it was neither with universal joy unstinted nor limitless trust that the various states chose to adopt the Constitution. The framers had seen the misuse of government power, the perversion of law as a tool of oppression. They could not help but be aware that the Revolution had begun with the attempted seizure, by forces of the British Crown, of weaponry owned both privately, by individuals, and collectively, by non-governmental groups and the Militia of the colony of Massachusetts. The first six amendments to the Constitution reflect perfectly the Crown's attempts at oppression prior to and during the Revolution: infringements of speech and of the press, seizures of arms, quartering of soldiers on the populace to serve as de facto spies, etc.

That, given this history, the Bill of Rights was required for ratification of the Constitution speaks eloquently of the distrust of governmental power felt by the states and by their citizens. Each of the other of the first six amendments placated this distrust in their own ways. The Second Amendment did so by insuring that the Federal government could not deprive the states of their right of revolution, which existed in the arms held by right, and the rights held, by their citizens - the "people".[2]

Nor is there any reason to believe that the term "people" is synonymous with "State". Present in the Second Amendment and repeated in the 10th, people and state are plainly different, otherwise there would be no reason to mention both. No more can we say that "State" and "United States" are the same. We must assume the framers knew what they were doing. The beauty and poetry of the language; its clarity; the fact that the Constitution has served us so well for over two centuries - all argue that the framers knew full well the import of every carefully chosen word. Therefore, it is the right of the "people" to keep and bear arms that the Federal government may not infringe, even though that also serves to prevent the Federal government from disarming the states.

Thus it is easily seen that the Second Amendment was at least minimally intended to be a guarantee of the collective right of a state or group of states to revolt against a potentially oppressive national government through non-interference with the states' citizens' individual right to the means of revolt; weapons, specifically militarily effective firearms.

Under this view there is no "irresolvable practical problem" inherent in granting the people the right of armed insurrection. The legal right, which might be better said to be the legal and practical right, to maintain armed forces suitable for revolt - even if only potentially, rests with the states. It rests with their ability to raise their militias, which are not merely that minor spin off of the militia, the National Guard, but rather - by tradition and law - the people as a whole.

Concerning the National Guard, the organized militia, one must repeat that it is merely a part, a small part, of the militia as a whole. Nor is it an entirely satisfactory part if it is expected to serve as a potential means of revolution. With under half a million men and women, and at one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer, the Guard is both too small and too indifferently trained to serve as a counterweight to federal reserve and regular forces numbering in the range of two million.

Of course the unorganized militia is not merely poorly trained, it is essentially untrained. Nonetheless, with something like one hundred million men (and potentially a like number of women), the unorganized militia is a terribly strong counterweight to Federal forces so long as it possesses the means and the will to preserve liberty.[3]

This is so even if one does, as one should, include the National Guard under Federal force rather than state militia. Consider: the Federal government pays the individual members of the Guard, pays their retirement checks when they reach age sixty, and pays for their training. The Federal government owns the Guard's arms and equipment and can withdraw them at will. The Federal government presides over the structure - combat or non- combat - of the Guard's units. The legal commanders-in-chief of the various National Guards, the state governors, can no longer even withhold their National Guards from Federal service.

In short, in no way does the National Guard any longer serve the purpose of the Second Amendment, to preserve the means of effective revolution in some hands other than the Federal government's.

As a practical right, however, no measure, to include outright repeal of the Second Amendment, can remove the right of revolt from the states or their citizens. Neither could any government grant such a right. This is especially true if one takes the admittedly non- progressive, but thoroughly Constitutional, view that government is the creature of the people, deriving its rights and powers from them and not, as Mr. Craco seems to assume, the other way around. The right to revolt is inherent in sentience (to include sentience of a fairly low order; even a mule can revolt).

One might well ask, if the right to revolt is inherent, what need there is for guns to preserve that right. The answer is simply this. The right to possession of firearms, and the fact of such possession, addresses the likelihood of success. Likelihood of success, in turn, addresses the degree of oppression up with which the people will put before revolting.

But will not the law and the political process prevent oppression? Lawyers, naturally enough, disparage violence and look to these things to prevent or, prevention failing, right wrongs. This helps to explain their general antipathy towards the Second Amendment which seems so obviously violence oriented and anti-political as to appear undemocratic. Lawyers, perhaps, should not be so complacent. That same rule of law which has given us such milestones in individual liberty as Dred Scott[4] and Buck v. Bell[5], and which upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War[6], does not appear nearly infallible...or necessarily just.

The political process, while it has often done great good, can still subject minorities to disadvantages ranging, in the case of Native-Americans, nearly to extinction. In their case in particular the political process, the democratic majority voice, has mandated outrages that the unarmed legal system has proven powerless to prevent.

Therefore the Second Amendment is frankly undemocratic, in the sense that it permits even a minority to have the means of revolt in lieu of acceptance of perhaps arbitrary and dangerous majority positions. Indeed, the revolutionaries of 1776 were but a small minority, perhaps a third of the population of the thirteen colonies. Of course, they were acting extra-constitutionally. Are we to say now they were wrong? If so, is the Constitution therefore invalid?

Virtually every democratic government in the world came about, now and throughout history, through armed revolution by some substantial part, but not always a majority, of its citizenry against its predecessor government. This is especially true of those far from anachronistic (the late and lamented Dean Roscoe Pound's opinion notwithstanding) militia based armed camps known as Israel and Switzerland.

Therefore, though I will not claim that the framers had the fixed intention of providing for minority revolt outside of, perhaps, a minority of states, I do maintain that this is at least a beneficial side effect.[7] The Second Amendment allows citizens, suicidally if alone, more effectively in large groups, to proclaim: "Vote as you will. But remember, the vote is but one way, and an inaccurate one at that, of measuring real - as opposed to merely theoretical political or judicial - power. You have yet to tally the level of real power. We have the will. We have the means. Together they make real power. Oppress at your peril."

The Second Amendment may not directly address, was probably never conceived as being in that more innocent age, an intended answer to internment camps for Japanese- Americans, or the Warsaw Ghetto[8] for that matter. It can provide a partial solution and deterrent to such.

The question remains; "How can / why should a government enshrine the means of its own overthrow?" As Mr. Craco phrased it; "The Constitution's objective was to create government..." The question is pointed and Mr. Craco's observation at least half true. Yet creation was not the whole purpose behind the Constitution. Indeed creation of a republican government would seem to have been to little point without some thought being given to its preservation...as a republican government.

Here the Second Amendment, in conjunction with the rest of the Bill of Rights, serves its purpose. It does so not in overthrowing the government necessarily (surely something no sane person wishes either to see or to see become necessary) but rather in making it clear that, whether in the hands of the states or in the hands of the people, the means exist to overthrow that government, thereby discouraging that government from ever mutating into one which must be overthrown.

While it could be argued that no article of the Bill of Rights would remain as secure if any of the others were undermined or repealed, we may limit discussion of their mutually reinforcing character to the interdependence between the Second and First Amendments.

The First Amendment may be fairly characterized as incapable of self defense against a government gone oppressive and determined to preserve or expand itself. Peaceable assemblies can be declared riots and suppressed by soldiery and police. Presses may be smashed with impunity by a government sufficiently powerful and ruthless. Threats of imprisonment, torture, retaliation against loved ones, and death are historically sufficient to quiet all but the bravest tongues. Moreover, even very brave tongues are quieted by death.

Likewise, and the National Rifle Association seems not fully to appreciate this, the Second Amendment is incapable of effective defense on its own, no matter the incidence of ownership of so-called assault rifles. Unless citizens are free to speak, to gather, to be a part of a community - not lone spirits, they will not generally resist oppression, even if armed, Ruby Ridge and Rambo notwithstanding.[9]

Together, however, the First Amendment allows citizens to know they are not alone and to make a stand confident of support when there is a cause worthy of support, with the arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Therefore it is not to enshrine the means of its own destruction that our republican Constitution includes a right to the means of revolution, and the right to speak of it and discuss its need, but rather to preserve a true republican government and not merely the forms of one. In this way, the Second Amendment is not suicidal but self-preservational.

There is a lovely quotation, oft cited by the American Civil Liberties Union, from an anti-Nazi man of the cloth, One Pastor Martin Niemoller. It goes to the effect that "First they came for the Communists and I didn't object because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't object because I wasn't a trade unionist..." The quote goes on to Jews, Catholics, etc. and ends with "And then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to object."

This is a lovely, stirring piece of prose. As a matter of historical record, however, Pastor Niemoller got it wrong. Perhaps learning from the British mistake of first oppressing and then going after the arms, the Nazis first went after the guns and only then began widespread and serious governmental oppression (as opposed to that oppression done merely by Hitler's NSDAP as an extra-governmental political party). However, the Nazis need not have restricted themselves to lessons learned from the Crown. In first going after private arms and then establishing an autocracy the Nazis were following the practice of modern tyrants ranging from Tokugawa Ieyasu to Mussolini and Lenin. The lesson has not been lost on the Mao's, Idi Amins and Pol Pots of yesterday's headlines.

It would be a strange thing if the framers, given their own experience of the Revolution and its preludes, the known history of oppression throughout the world up to their time, their own awesome genius, their realism, and their dedication to republican principles, had intended that militarily useful arms - or even all arms - be kept out of citizen hands, that the state militias be reduced to a paid National Guard and made utterly subordinate to the national government, that their successors in office be unrestricted and irresistible should they choose some day to exercise arbitrary and tyrannical power, and that - despite taking great care to separate Federal political power, and Federal from state power - should have placed all ultimate coercive power in Federal hands. Given modern history, fortunately - so far - foreign modern history, one might say that the framers were more than geniuses; they were positively prescient in not so arranging our Constitution.

"But," one hears in the background, "the framers were familiar with mere muskets. They could never have envisioned assault rifles or large capacity pistols that can fire dozens of shots in seconds." Could they not? Repeating arms had been widely, if inaccurately, conjectured by 1787 and a few poor prototypes built. Moreover, cannon capable of firing not dozens of projectiles in seconds but hundreds in an immeasurable fraction of a second were apparently permissible and in hands neither Federal nor state.[10] There is no reason to believe that the framers were ignorant of the technological world of their day and its potentials.

It is not to be expected that this little piece will influence pro-gun control readers any more than printing Mr. Craco's article in a National Rifle Association magazine would convince anyone in the NRA of his arguments. The two sides have grown so far apart that, like abolitionists and slave holders prior to and during the Civil War, on this issue as on that, they can neither speak the same language nor feel the same emotions.

Consider the following hypothetical. Imagine, hard though it be, that some state should decide to reinvigorate its Militia Act, possibly to undermine the private "militias" that feature so prominently, and generally undeservedly, in the news. Typically such acts define the militia in two or three tiers: the National Guard, sometimes the State Guard or State Militia, and the unorganized militia, which is minimally composed of all able bodied adult males.

In its reinvigoration, said state greatly expands its State Guard (or State Militia), say to include everyone of good character (neither felons nor anyone convicted of a crime of domestic violence accepted) from those willing to volunteer for such standing from the unorganized militia. The state collects money from the volunteers and uses that money to purchase, on their behalf, militarily effective arms - real assault rifles able to fire on full automatic, grenade launchers, machine guns, mortars, cannon - tanks and jet fighters just possibly.[11]

To carefully keep within the United State's Supreme Court's guidance on the need to be in an organized militia to be protected by the Second Amendment, the state further limits the volunteers to those who have completed a basic Federal course of military instruction or some, perhaps much shorter and probably less stressful, state equivalent. Further in the interests of being "well regulated", volunteers are organized into regiments perhaps bearing the traditions of disappeared state organizations (54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry...or 4th Virginia?). Volunteers are required to muster once annually to demonstrate proficiency with their arms. Volunteers are required to keep their arms and ammunition in their possession or at home. To encourage proficiency, volunteers are also encouraged to carry their arms at all times.

Is this constitutional? Is it beyond the power of the Federal government to infringe upon?

The Constitution states plainly, without commentary upon the requisite size, that a "Well regulated militia [is] necessary to the security of a free State." No branch, nor every branch of the Federal government acting together, has the power to gainsay this.

"Well regulated" would appear to be a relative expression. What is well regulated for a militia is not the same as what is well regulated for a professional force. Still, it would seem that demanding preliminary training and an annual muster in regiments would more than meet this traditional requirement. It would also seem to be constitutionally difficult for Congress to combat this by radically changing the traditional understanding of the service requirements of a militia.

Having met the first two obvious tests, the rest of the Constitution speaks plainly and nothing the courts have said is contrary. The Federal government may not infringe the keeping and bearing of arms by people who are in a well regulated militia which is constitutionally necessary to the security of a free state. (Perhaps a better question, and one which cannot be discussed here, is whether this would make the National Firearms Act of 1934 and its sequelae unconstitutional to apply to such State Guard members. Would these laws become unconstitutional, or merely impossible, to apply in any given case?)

If this constitutionally perfect and judicially unassailable programs fails to appeal to the reader one must ask why. The answer, of course, is that the reader simply loathes the Second Amendment, for whatever reason or reasons, and wishes it repealed or rendered defunct through some other, non-constitutional, means. One feels compelled to point out, however, that the last time any substantial group of Americans felt so strongly about a purely domestic issue, a threatened "right" (slavery, see above), the result was genuine civil war.

One suspects that it is infuriating to advocates of gun control that pro-Second Amendment citizens resist their efforts so intractably as even to seem to malign their motives. What is further a pity, and a dangerous situation, is that gun control advocates, sublimely sure of their virtue and rightness, fail to understand the fury that they inspire.

It is of no help to their standing with pro-gun rights citizens that the legacy of gun control in this country began with the "Black Codes" of the post Civil War South that had as their aim the oppression of black citizens. That the Gun Control Act of 1968 drew so many of its key provisions in nearly word for word translation from Hitler's law restricting firearms possession from the hands of his potential enemies places the modern gun control movement in no savory historical company.

Gun control advocates might do well to consider a second hypothetical: What if the Supreme Court did decide that the Federal Government lacked the authority to infringe upon militarily effective, or indeed any, firearms? What if it were to be decided that, under the 14th Amendment, states also were barred from implementing firearms restrictions? Impermissible? Outrageous? Intolerable?

Intolerable. And that is precisely how pro-Second Amendment citizens feel about attacks upon what they perceive as an absolute right under the Second Amendment. What gun control advocates would contemplate or do to prevent the Federal government from enforcing this liberty, others might do, or even more, to preserve and promote it.

And gun control advocates are not trusted by firearms rights advocates. The anti-gun movement speaks of gun control and crime control as if they were synonymous. Yet those states and cities with the most restrictive gun control laws have also been those with the highest crime rates. Admittedly, crime in some of those places, particularly very large cities, would be greater than the national norm in any event. Perhaps it is so that only extremely restrictive gun control has kept as much of a lid on crime as has been achieved. Moreover, it may be claimed, crime nationally has been dropping even as laws restricting guns have become more widespread and thorough.

Which might be persuasive but for two things. Some dozens of states across the nation have in recent years, rather than further restricting firearms rights, granted far more liberal rights to concealed carry of a handgun through "Show Cause" and "Shall Issue" laws. In at least one such state, Florida, violent crime has dropped to a dramatic degree, far more than the national average.

Moreover, the idea of gun control as crime control is simply contra-intuitive to pro- firearms rights people. With firearms laws almost more restrictive than could be imagined in this country, Scotland experienced a recent and horrid massacre of school children differing little from one which occurred in a California McDonalds. Australia, too, has had its massacre despite very tight restrictions. Similarly, Canada - despite extremely restrictive anti-gun laws - had its university massacre. Neither did law serve to prevent the mass shooting of innocent subway riders in New York City. Curiously, Switzerland, with a government provided fully automatic weapon in over half of its households, has had no such incident.

To a pro-gun rights citizen, however, the answer to each of those obscenities, or at least the key to preventing their reoccurrence, is obvious. Since lunatics are rather badly outnumbered by the reasonably sane and responsible, freely and widely owned and borne firearms could have, in each case, limited the damage by deterring, and if necessary eliminating, the perpetrator. This is not to say that the purpose of the Second Amendment is crime control or even that most pro-gun rights citizens believe it is. It is merely a beneficial side effect, as gun control is perceived as having the opposite effect.

So, with whatever justice, when gun control advocates claim that gun control is crime control the claim falls on ears not deaf but red with anger at what is assumed to be a willful lie.[12] Many people, and not merely the thoroughly pathetic unofficial civilian "militias",[13] have been forced to ask themselves what motive could be behind gun control when its stated motive seems to them so completely impossible that no intelligent human being could put credence in it.

Nor should advocates of gun control be so confident of their ultimate victory. They should not even be confident of preserving what they have gained for their cause. As Mr. Craco mentioned in his article, for the first time in modern history a Supreme Court Justice has raised the possibility that the Second Amendment means something very like what the NRA claims it to mean. In Casey v. Planned Parenthood the Court suggested that all of the first eight amendments were fundamental individual rights.[14] Unprecedentedly, twice in the last three years the Supreme Court has struck down gun-control measures, albeit on other grounds (which is not unreasonable since the laws in question were gun control laws disguised as something else).[15] Moreover, a bill, House Bill 339, has been introduced into the House of Representatives which, if passed, would require any state that permits any of its citizens to carry a concealed handgun also to permit the citizens of any other state who have concealed carry permits to carry in that state. Even the old standby of Miller v. United States serves to do no more than establish that the Federal government can limit weapons only so long as those weapons have no relationship to a well regulated militia.[16]

Neither is it any longer true that the bulk of legal scholarship stands firmly in favor of the constitutionality of Federal gun control. In recent years extremely well respected law professors, themselves by no means pro-gun fanatics, have published articles in the very highest echelons of American law reviews which support the view of the Second Amendment as establishing an individual right to keep and bear firearms or, at least, a right which exists somewhere and which the Federal government lacks authority to infringe.[17]

Therefore, despite unquestioned political and legal successes in the past, the gun control movement can still lose in the courts and through the political process. Given the depth of feeling this issue engenders on both sides, feelings as profound as any that shook the country in the middle of the last century, it is not so clear that it is ultimately possible for the gun control movement to win, whatever may be decided politically or through the courts. So long as the First Amendment remains strong, and gun owners and advocates need not feel alone, resistance remains a possibility. Beyond the lunatic fringe of the "militia" movement are the large mass of citizens which it cannot be assumed will remain acquiescent in the face of the what appears to be a movement to completely disarm them for no true and valid reason and suspected, if inarticulable, bad reasons. For any issue less sacred than ending human slavery or preserving the country as an undivided whole we ought tread very lightly indeed before disturbing emotions of this depth and intensity.

[1] As an aside, isn't it time and past time to number women among the ranks of the militia?

[2] See Justice Hugo Black's dissent in Adamson v. California, 67 S.Ct., 1672, 1685 (1947). Whatever the merits of the decision in the case, Justice Black's observations on the adoption of the Bill of Rights seem unassailable.

[3] The "embattled farmers" of Concord Green and the 15 to 20 thousand Minutemen who rallied against the 600 odd British regulars and drove them back to Boston in April, 1775 are an excellent illustration that, in war, quantity has a quality all its own. It would seem, too, that the Viet Cong had something to say about the utility of citizen soldier riflemen against even the most modern jet fighters.

[4]Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

[5]Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1926).

[6] Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 314 (1944).

[7] Of course, since the Revolution began not with the colonial governments but in the hearts and minds - and eventually actions - of individuals, the framers may have had this in mind.

[8] In 1944, the Nazi death machine finally turned its attention to the extermination of the Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. Previously cleared ghettos had gone down without a struggle. Warsaw proved a different case. With illegally acquired weapons the Ghetto's defenders initially drove out the Nazis who had come for them and their families. Today we regret that their cause was lost. Still, we should be justly proud of the men and women who caused the SS troopers to exclaim in their hasty retreat; "Liebe Gott, die Juden haben waffen!" ("Dear God, the Jews have guns.")

[9] See, generally, Men Against Fire, S.L.A. Marshall for a discussion of the relative courage of soldiers when alone and when in a group. There will, or course, always be a few people, transcendentally motivated, who will fight even if alone...as occurred at Ruby Ridge. Rambo is a myth.

[10]Private merchant ships, for example, were usually armed with cannon. Moreover, cannon in private hands have appeared, and been photographed, at least as recently as the troubles in Kansas just prior to the Civil War. The small cannon targeted for seizure by the British troops at Lexington and Concord were in private, not government, hands.

[11]Not so far fetched: world class tanks, rebuilt to be sure, have been offered for sale by the Ukraine for as little as $60,000. A MiG-21 jet fighter can be had for a bit over $2,000,000. Since the fall of Soviet Communism even attack submarines can be had at a bargain price.

[12] Which may be unfair. A movement that under the rubric of crime control can push through bans on small caliber, cheap and unreliable weapons ("Saturday Night Specials"), thereby driving criminals to adopt larger caliber, more reliable and effective weapons, is unlikely to be a terribly competent threat, establishment of tyranny-wise. Similarly, the ban of rifles with bayonet lugs, no doubt in response to the incalculable (because non-existent) number of drive-by bayonetings experienced in this country, establishes some proof of the non-existence of any hidden rational purpose.

[13] Fortunately, since there is really only one issue around which the modern "militiamen" can rally, and since that issue is completely within the power of the Federal government to control, the "militias" pose little problem of control and suppression. Their core value is the uninfringed right to arms. The Federal government need merely cease that infringement and the "militias" can be expected to wither and die. As suggested above, a state could also undermine the "militias" by effectively incorporating and controlling them.

[14] Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 112 S.Ct. 2792, 2804-5 (1992).

[15]United States v. Lopez, 115 S.Ct. 1624 (1995). Printz and Mack v. United States, 117 S.Ct. 2365 (1997).

[16]Miller v. United States, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). Although in Miller the Supreme Court had no notice of a such a relationship it is perhaps worth noting that the type of weapon at issue, a sawed off shotgun, was in fact used in both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. That they were not used in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf has more to do with the short duration of the fighting than with the utility of this type of weapon. What is more, today between 20 and 30% of Army dismounted infantry and 12% of Marine infantry carry weapons, grenade launchers, that become sawed off shotguns with the simple insertion of a round of ammunition containing buckshot. Perhaps when judges render military opinions those opinions ought be taken with a grain of salt.

[17]William Van Alstyne, The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Arms, 43 Duke L.J. 1255 (1994); Sanford Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale L.J. 637 (1989). In other words, I'll see your Drayton Law Review with a Duke and raise you a Yale.