Renee Lerner

Renee Lerner is the Donald Phillip Rothschild Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, and the author of The Resilience of Substantive Rights and the False Hope of Procedural Rights: The Case of the Second Amendment and the Seventh Amendment, 116 Northwestern Law Review 275 (2021). She specializes in U.S. and English legal history, civil and criminal procedure, and comparative law. In particular, she has written extensively about, among other things, the history of American juries.

Latest from Renee Lerner

Guns

The Second Amendment vs. the Seventh Amendment: The Distinction Between Substantive and Procedural Rights

Substantive rights have a core that can be meaningfully interpreted and protected; they can exist independently of a particular government or a particular legal system. Procedural rights lack such an independent core because they are necessarily embedded in a whole system of legal procedure, and they depend on that system for their meaning.

|The Volokh Conspiracy |

Guns

The Second Amendment vs. the Seventh Amendment: Substantive vs. Procedural Rights; Part 1: Similarities and Differences

Although the affinities between the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and the Seventh Amendment right to civil jury trial seem strong, there are crucial differences. The first concerns individual accountability and the ability to understand responsibilities; the second concerns the distinction between substantive rights and procedural rights.

|The Volokh Conspiracy |

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