SCOTUS Gun Watch – Week of 6/21/21

There are no new petitions from the past week, but the Supreme Court did act on one pending Second Amendment petition in its order list this morning. It denied cert in Libertarian Party of Erie County v. Cuomo which may offer some hints into how narrowly the Court is considering its Corlett grant to be. Consider that Libertarian Party challenges New York’s pistol permit law, relying on many of the same arguments that apply to Corlett’s challenge. The Libertarian Party cert petition includes arguments against the constitutionality of the same “proper cause” requirement challenged in Corlett, though it also includes a host of other features of the law the challengers find objectionable. The petition is also written in a much more incendiary style than Corlett. If the Court was intentionally signally something about how it reads the Corlett grant (possible, though hard to say), it may be that it is limiting itself to considering whether the denial of concealed carry permits to the challengers in Corlett violate their Second Amendment rights, without taking on the whole apparatus of public carry, let alone the requirement to obtain a permit to possess or carry a gun. It may also, though probably less likely, signal that the Court does not anticipate making wholesale changes to Second Amendment methodology that would call into question the 1,000 or so Second Amendment claims decided post-Heller. With oral argument in Corlett likely to happen this fall, we should know soon enough what the new Second Amendment will look like.

Petitions Pending

Petitions Disposed