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By Root 1659 0

courts should separately consider four different categories of justifications for restricting rights: (1) Scope justifications, which derive from constitutional text, original meaning, tradition, or background principles; (2) burden justifications, which rest on the claim that a particular law doesn't impose a substantial burden on the right, and thus doesn't unconstitutionally infringe it; (3) danger reduction justifications, which rest on the claim that some particular exercise of the right is so unusually dangerous that it might justify restricting the right; and (4) government as proprietor justifications, which rest on the government's special role as property owner, employer, or subsidizer.

I suggest where the constitutional thresholds for determining the adequacy of these justifications might be set, and I use this framework to analyze a wide range of restrictions: “what” restrictions (such as bans on machine guns, so-called “assault weapons,” or unpersonalized handguns), “who” restrictions (such as bans on possession by felons, misdemeanants, noncitizens, or 18-to-20-year-olds), “where” restrictions (such as bans on carrying in public, in places that serve alcohol, or in parks, or bans on possessing in public housing projects), “how” restrictions (such as storage regulations), “when” restrictions (such as waiting periods), “who knows” regulations (such as licensing or registration requirements), and taxes and other expenses.

Though it's unusual to number individual clauses in normal prose, here the numbering quickly shows the hurried reader how the sentence is structured, and what the four elements of the proposed framework are. It might have even been helpful to number the list in the last paragraph, but too much numbering might have annoyed readers—a bit of departure from standard prose style is fine, but more might have made the abstract look odd. And the quotation marks surrounding the key items in the last paragraph probably provide some internal delimiters that can serve as alternatives to numbering.

Two more tips:

1. Don't just say “this article analyzes problem X”; say, as well as you can given the limited space, what your solution to problem X is. (The second abstract quoted above does violate this rule, but that's probably inevitable given the size of that article and the number of specific restrictions the abstract covers.)

2. Talk about concepts, not case names, statutory citations, or other scholars to whom you're responding, unless the cases, statutes, or people are very important to your topic and nearly certain to be familiar to your likely readers.

D. Working with Law Journal Editors

So your article is accepted for publication, whether at your school or elsewhere. Now, the journal will cite-check it, and work with you to edit it. Here are some tips for getting the most out of this process.

1. Have the right attitude about edits

Editors are law students just like you are (or like you recently were). They have some advantages over you: (1) They are probably more objective about the subject and about your writing than you are, so they can see flaws that you might miss. (2) They probably know less about the subject than you do, so they can more easily read things from the average reader's perspective, and see where the article doesn't explain enough things that the reader would need to know. (3) Some of them are better writers than you are, perhaps because they have more prelaw-school writing experience, or are just more talented.

They also have some disadvantages compared to you: (1) They know less about the subject than you do, so some of their suggested changes may be incorrect. (2) Some of them are worse writers than you are, so their suggested changes may be inelegant or even ungrammatical. (3) They're proposing changes and additions to an existing article, and this new material may clash stylistically with the existing material. (4) The article is your article, not theirs, so you are entitled to make your point in your style, not their point in theirs.

These observations