Leadership
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).
-1720195198.jpg)
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).
.jpg)
Andrew M. Willinger ’16
Executive Director
Willinger joined the Center for Firearms Law as Executive Director in 2022, after practicing as a litigation associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in New York. He writes and comments on Second Amendment decisions and issues related to firearms law. Willinger has been quoted and interviewed by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other outlets, and his scholarship has been published in the Washington University Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Duke Law Journal Online.
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.