SCOTUS Gun Watch – Week of 2/8/21

Another week that I count with no new Second Amendment or firearms law centric cert petitions. One more complicating factor that has likely drawn the pending petitions out longer is that the administration changed over on January 20th, and now a Biden Department of Justice is opposing these challenges. That may not change the substantive response all that dramatically—the Justice Department has uniformly defended the constitutionality of federal gun laws, even when it has taken positions friendlier to gun rights—but now it’s fair to assume that even if the Court grants one of these petitions, it wouldn’t hear the case until next Term, beginning in October 2021. (Two years ago, the Court granted the cert petition in NYSRPA in January 2019 and still did not schedule oral arguments until December 2019, and by then quite a bit had changed.) In all likelihood, that means we would not get a decision in one of these Second Amendment cases until June 2022, since the Court typically releases opinions from its most contested cases at the end of the Term. Of course, the Court is especially unpredictable in this area of law and it could act more quickly, either after full briefing or by deciding a case without oral argument, like it did with Caetano in 2016.

Petitions Pending

Petitions Disposed