Leadership

Hayley Lawrence '21

Executive Director

Lawrence joined the Center for Firearms Law as Executive Director in 2026, after practicing as a litigation associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, DC. She writes in the space of Second Amendment law and gender studies, as well as at the intersection of the Second Amendment and criminal law. Lawrence received her J.D. and LL.M. with honors from Duke Law School in 2021. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Batten School for Public Policy (BA '16). When not buried among stacks of books and law review articles, she enjoys making ceramics and spending time with her husband and two cats.

For media and other inquiries, please contact Hayley at hayley.lawrence@law.duke.edu

Ethan Margolis

Repository Manager

Margolis joined the Center as Repository Manager in 2023. He manages the Center’s Repository of Historical Gun Laws and conducts archival research to identify historical gun regulations. Margolis holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History from North Carolina State University, and he received his Master of Library and Information Science degree from North Carolina Central University.

Joseph Blocher

Faculty Director & Center Co-Founder

Blocher, the Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, researches federal and state constitutional law, the First and Second Amendments, legal history, and property. His current scholarship addresses issues of gun rights and regulation, free speech, sovereignty, and refugee law. He has published dozens of articles on those topics and co-authored Free Speech Beyond Words (NYU Press, 2017) and The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Darrell A. H. Miller

Center Co-Founder

Miller is a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago School of Law. He writes and teaches in the areas of civil rights, constitutional law, civil procedure, state and local government law, and legal history. His scholarship on the Second and Thirteenth Amendments has been published in leading law reviews and cited by the Supreme Court, federal Courts of Appeals and District Courts, and in congressional testimony and legal briefs. With Joseph Blocher, he is the author of The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018).