Private militia/army

I knew I remembered that it has no basis in law. Someone challenged me to look it up, so I did

Private militias or mercenary armies appear to have no special legal standing under the Constitution, according to legal experts, government officials and, most importantly, Supreme Court justices. A senior federal official familiar with says it rejects the claim of any group that cites the "well-regulated militia" phrase in the Second Amendment to support the formation of private armies: Militias only can be authorized by federal or state governments.

The Clinton administration's position is supported by Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University who served President Bush as deputy White House counsel. Today, a "well-regulated militia" refers to groups such as the National Guard, he says. that have formed in almost all 50 states "have no standing as militias under the Constitution."

Lund cites Presser vs. Illinois, an 1886 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that certain private activist groups had no right to conduct paramilitary exercises in Illinois. The court rejected the claim that the Second Amendment - which states "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" - invalidated an Illinois statute that prohibited "any body of men whatever, other than the regular organized volunteer militia of this state, and the troops of the United States ... to drill or parade with arms in any city or town of this state without the license of the governor thereof."

Ironically, the only Supreme Court opinion even indirectly addressing the issue of private militias reversed a ruling of U.S. Circuit Judge Alfred P. Murrah, for whom the bombed Oklahoma City federal building was named. "No private individual has the power to conscript or mobilize a private army with such authorities over persons as the government rests in echelons of command," Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in a unanimous 1950 opinion. That combined case, Feres vs. United States, involved the privilege of the military against lawsuits. In the opinion Jackson dismissed the idea there were any "like circumstances" to a civilian military or state militia. "The nearest parallel, even if we were to treat `private individual' as including a state, would be the relationship between the states and their militia," Jackson wrote in reversing Murrah's ruling. Jackson's opinion was cited in a 1955 decision and again in a 1970 civil-rights case that referred to the Ku Klux Klan, which was termed a "widespread conspiracy operating wholly outside the law."

<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n21_v11/ai_16941861>

edited to add link