In his 1989 essay The Embarrassing Second Amendment, Sanford Levinson suggested that left-leaning scholars avoid studying the Second Amendment because they are embarrassed that its text might mean what gun-rights proponents claim it means—an individual right to bear arms. Levinson urged such scholars to better engage the text, both to model intellectual integrity and to avoid unnecessarily ceding the terms of a critical constitutional debate. This Article makes a similar argument with respect to the right to counsel granted by the Sixth Amendment.

A high-stakes debate has emerged around the legislative expansion of forensic DNA databases, a move that would assist thousands of criminal investigations but also raise profound privacy issues. In Maryland v. King, where the Court upheld the constitutionality of forced DNA sampling of arrestees, Justice Alito described the Court’s 2013 decision as “perhaps the most…