Faculty Co-Director and Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor Law. Blocher 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).
Earlier this summer, in United States v. Perez, a divided panel of the Second Circuit rejected a challenge to 922(g)(5)—the federal law prohibiting gun possession by undocumented immigrants. I missed the case at the time, but Law360 has an interesting write up on the decision and how it fits into broader litigation regarding immigrants’ gun […]
Last Term, in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the Supreme Court found that a California regulation requiring agricultural employers to allow union organizers onto their farms constituted a taking. Noah Levine has a great blog post here about what Cedar Point could mean for takings claims regarding large capacity magazines and other forms of gun-related […]
Although the Second Amendment still tends to get all the attention in debates about firearms law, scholars are starting to pay more attention to state-level preemption laws, which currently present a more significant legal barrier to gun regulation than the Constitution. Broad changes in preemption law have been a topic of particular concern to scholars […]
What can armed protest teach about the case for gun regulation? Reva Siegel and I have just posted our article, When Guns Threaten the Public Sphere: Recovering the Common Law Approach to Public Safety, which is forthcoming as part of the Northwestern Law Review symposium the Center co-sponsored this past fall. Here is the abstract: […]
It’s fair to say that when the Supreme Court granted cert in NYSRPA, I did not expect that the eventual Harvard Law Review Case Comment about the decision would appear under the header “Article III—Justiciability—Mootness.” But, of course, that’s just how the case ended up. Still, the Comment, which was just published online (and is […]
Judge Amy Coney Barrett opened her dissent in Kanter v. Barr by identifying a historical principle underlying modern gun regulation: “History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns.” She went on to suggest that dangerousness is the Second Amendment’s exclusive limiting principle, such […]
Earlier this month, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Finnish authorities violated the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to take sufficient steps to prevent a school shooting. (h/t Larry Helfer) From the Registrar of Court’s summary of the facts: The perpetrator had been given a gun licence by the local police […]
Sheila Simon, Assistant Professor of Law at Southern Illinois University School of Law, recently published a fascinating paper about gun sanctuary ordinances – On Target? Assessing Gun Sanctuary Ordinances that Conflict with State Law, 122 W. Va. L. Rev. 817 (2020) – which she was generous enough to discuss with me in our most recent […]
I recently had a chance to talk with Natalie Nanasi, Assistant Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law and Director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women. Prof. Nanasi has written a lot of incisive scholarship on issues including immigration, domestic violence, and feminist legal theory. […]
Second Amendment scholars naturally spend a great deal of time and energy focusing on questions about the history of gun rights and regulation, but less time investigating questions about how that history is or should be presented to the public in venues like museum exhibits. Historian Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan) has done as much as any […]
[This discussion from Joseph Blocher and Reva Siegel is cross-posted from Oral Argument 2.0] New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York No. 18-280 – Argued December 2, 2019 At Issue Whether a New York City rule banning the transportation of a licensed, locked, and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range […]
The closure of “non-essential” businesses in response to the spread of Covid-19 raises a host of difficult legal questions. Among those questions, of course, are some involving right to keep and bear arms. Put simply: Does the Second Amendment permit gun stores be temporarily closed? Some advocates and commentators have suggested that this is an […]
[This post by Reva Siegel and Joseph Blocher was originally published on the Take Care blog on 12/2 and and is cross-posted there.] The Supreme Court is about to hear argument in its first major Second Amendment case in nearly a decade. The regulation in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York (NYSRPA), which restricted transport of […]
[This post is part of a symposium on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, hosted on SCOTUSblog and is cross-posted there.] Joseph Blocher is Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where he co-directs the Center for Firearms Law. Eric Ruben is Assistant Professor of […]
When it comes to the “Arms” protected by the Second Amendment, the conceptual space is typically divided into two categories. Some weapons, like those that are “dangerous and unusual,” can be banned without raising any constitutional problems. For those that are not dangerous and unusual, the government has to satisfy some requisite level of scrutiny. […]
In the wake of Heller, state and federal courts have overwhelmingly applied what has come to be known as the “Two Part Test.” The first part is a threshold inquiry about whether the challenged regulation intersects with the Second Amendment at all. If the answer to that inquiry is yes, then courts move on to […]
October was Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and as Jake noted in his post earlier this week, the Center fortunately had a chance to help coordinate a well-attended event on the topic, which was co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for […]
Earlier this week, Yale law students Joshua Feinzig and Joshua Zoffer published a powerful piece in The Atlantic describing the “A Constitutional Case for Gun Control.” Inspired in part by Robert Cover’s work on the essential role of narrative in imbuing law with moral authority, they argue that the narrative-driven brief filed by the March […]
Most legal scholarship and public debate about gun rights and regulation focuses on whether and how gun laws can prevent homicide—understandably so, given the astounding number of gun homicides in the United States every year. But as those closer to the debate are well aware, the majority of gun deaths are by suicide. And far […]
[This post is part of a symposium on Mary Anne Franks, The Cult of the Constitution (Stanford University Press, 2019), hosted on the Balkinization blog and is cross-posted there.] The second chapter of Mary Anne Franks’ exceptional new book, Cult of the Constitution, shows how constitutional fundamentalism distorts debates about gun rights and regulation. In doing so, […]
The traditional model of constitutional rights puts the government on one side and individuals on the other; rights restrain the power of the former over the latter. But that model is a little bit over-simplified in a world of pluralistic rights disputes where constitutional interests arise on many sides simultaneously. Once one goes beyond the […]
Yesterday, amici filed briefs in support of the City in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York—the Second Amendment case that many thought (and some still think) might be a blockbuster. (Full disclosure: Along with Darrell Miller and Eric Ruben, I submitted an amicus brief in support of neither […]
Twenty seven years ago this week, Justice Powell’s clerk sent him a lengthy fax with the subject line “Handgun Article.” Along with Justice Stevens’ post-retirement commentary (about which Darrell and I will have more to say shortly), I think it might be the most thorough statement of a Justice’s views on guns and the Second […]
On Friday, the Center for Firearms Law hosted the first of what we hope will become an annual Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Workshop. The immediate goal was to give scholars—especially those new to the area—a chance to engage with another’s work. More broadly, and in keeping with the Center’s overall mission, our hope was to help […]
I’ve been thinking and writing about the Second Amendment for a decade, but this past year was the first time I’ve ever actually taught a course on firearms law—a seminar called “Second Amendment: History, Theory, and Practice.” The first three weeks covered some basic history and empirics, and an overview of the opinions in District […]
