Scholarship Highlight: Sanctuary Jurisdictions

Shawn Fields has posted an original and through-provoking new paper on Second Amendment Sanctuaries that will be published in the Northwestern Law Review later this year. From the abstract:

The term “sanctuary” has long expressed a sympathy for immigrants’ rights and resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Recently, the word has become associated with another divisive political topic, as local governments have begun declaring themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” in defiance of statewide gun control measures they deem unconstitutional. This gun rights resistance movement not only flips the political script on the nature of sanctuaries but presents important and challenging questions about local-state power sharing, the proper scope of “subfederal commandeering,” and the role of coordinate branches in constitutional decision making.

This Article provides the first scholarly treatment of Second Amendment Sanctuaries. In doing so, it explores both the unique facets of this new localism and the broader implications for sanctuary movements generally. Most early commentary on Second Amendment Sanctuaries dismisses them as purely symbolic and presumptively invalid pursuant to state preemption principles and the judicial supremacy model of constitutional interpretation. This Article challenges that narrative and articulates a theory of limited viability for these and other local intrastate resistance movements.

The theory proceeds in three parts, with each part presenting a novel approach to local-state governmental conflict that contributes to the existing literature. First, localities can resist broad state preemption in limited circumstances via the state’s “home rule” provisions when local regulation of a particular issue is rooted in history and has normative policy appeal. Second, localities may passively resist statewide regulation through a form of “subfederal anticommandeering” analogous to the Tenth Amendment’s anticommandeering principles protecting states from federal overreach, so long as the locality takes no affirmative steps to frustrate state enforcement. Third, local enforcement officers may defend their resistance on substantive constitutional grounds when the right at issue is not settled firmly by the judiciary. This “first impression departmentalism” reflects the proper role all coordinate branches of government have in defining the contours of constitutional provisions when emerging doctrine remains in a state of flux. These principles counsel in favor of the viability of at least some Second Amendment Sanctuaries as currently constructed, as well as sanctuaries resisting firearm deregulation and other statewide policy initiatives.