Law Professor Links Constitution’s Marque Clause to Private Naval Armament Rights

Adjunct professor Jonathan Goldstein of the University of Pennsylvania Law School has published a detailed study on Congress’s authority to issue letters of marque and regulate captures on land and water. He argues that this constitutional power implicitly acknowledges the existence of privately owned, cannon-equipped ships at the nation’s founding, challenging contemporary legal arguments that heavy weapons fall outside the Second Amendment’s scope.

Goldstein points out that cannons were legally unrestricted until the 1968 amendment to the National Firearms Act, which introduced taxes and registration for destructive devices. Citing the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, he notes that the Second Amendment is understood to cover all bearable arms, even those not present in 1791. The article references an archive of about 1,700 founding-era commissions to demonstrate that the Framers treated private naval armament as a given, leaving Congress to oversee its use on behalf of the United States rather than to prohibit it.