A slightly less cavalier attitude emerged when Scalia confronted the precedents that Heller was overturning. These were four previous Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment. The most recent, U.S. v. Miller (1939), reaffirmed the conclusion reached in the three earlier cases, that the right to bear arms was not an individual right but rather a right dependent on service in the militia. Although Scalia’s argument in Heller was a direct refutation of what had previously been considered “settled law,” he devoted seven pages to a review of his Supreme Court predecessors before reaching the
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