MICHAEL BELLESILES IS WRITING on the proper use of history in constitutional analysis.

That’s like having Joe Biden lecturing people on the evil of copying. Oh, wait. . .

UPDATE: History News Network is observing that the James Lindgren article on Michael Bellesiles’ errors has gotten a lot of downloads from this site:

On Friday August 16 blogger Glenn Reynolds published an Acrobat copy of the article–“Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal”–on his heavily-trafficked website, instapundit.com. By the following Wednesday the article, which features 237 footnotes, had been downloaded 55,853 times. As of August 26 the article had “racked up an impressive 82,843 downloads.” Notes Reynolds: “By way of comparison, the dead-tree circulation of the Yale Law Journal, where Lindgren’s piece appears, is just over 3,300.” Has there ever been a scholarly article that received a higher circulation? It may just be that Lindgren’s article is the world champ.

The figure as of yesterday afternoon was 87,482. Since Lindgren’s article is now also available for download on HNN, and on Lindgren’s own page, there’s a good chance that it’s broken the 100,000-download mark overall. I’d say Lindgren’s “world champ” status looks pretty good.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There’s more on Bellesiles here.