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SCOTUS Gun Watch – Week of 7/13/20

  • Date:
  • July 13th, 2020

By: Jacob Charles

With the issuance of its final opinions last week, the Supreme Court has wrapped up OT 2019. The Term began last October with an optimistic gun-rights community. The Court had granted review in a Second Amendment case for the first time since 2016, and was poised to hear arguments in such a case for the first time since 2010. It looked like more than the 2016 “grudging per curiam” might be coming down the pipeline to clarify and expand the right articulated in Heller. Those hopes were tempered after oral arguments in NYSRPA last December, and dashed this past April when the Court filed its per curiam opinion dismissing the case on mootness grounds--an opinion that said even less about Second Amendment substance than the 2016 Caetano decision had. If any hope lingered after NYSRPA, it was crushed in June when the Court denied cert in all of the cases it had been holding pending disposition of that case.

Now that the justices are on their summer recess, we don’t expect any Second Amendment news to break at the Supreme Court. But advocates will still file cert petitions, and we’ll track them here on a semi-monthly basis as we await orders from the Court’s “long conference” that opens up the 2020 Term this fall.

Case Ct. Below Pet. Filed Implicated Law/Issue Status
Rodriguez v. San Jose 9th Cir. 21-Feb-20 Warrantless search and seizure of firearms under Second & Fourth Amendments distributed for 29-Sept-20 conf.
Johnson v. United States 4th. Cir. 12-Jun-20 Vagueness challenge to ACCA’s elements clause distributed for 29-Sept-20 conf.
Zoie v Nebraska Neb. Sup. Ct. 22-June-20

 

Second and Sixth Amendment challenge to jury-less conviction that can result in gun disqualifer response due 27-July-20