Center Executive Director and lecturing fellow. Charles writes and teaches on the Second Amendment and firearms law. His primary academic interests include the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues confronting nascent Second Amendment jurisprudence and the immunity and related questions surrounding affirmative litigation against the firearms industry. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, and Law & Contemporary Problems, among others.
Open any of the myriad of news articles discussing New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, and you are likely to find descriptions of the case as “[t]he first gun rights case at the U.S. Supreme Court in a decade,” or something like that. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, […]
(Photo Credit: Nora V. Demleitner) This past Saturday, the Center was fortunate to organize a hot topic panel discussion at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. We used NYSRPA as a jumping off point to talk about open issues in Second Amendment law and scholarship. The main themes the speakers […]
Before looking forward to the big cases, issues, and expectations for the year ahead in firearms law, we’d like to highlight the Center for Firearms Law’s achievements this past year. After launching in February, we hosted a roundtable discussion with historians of English and Irish history, held the first ever Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Workshop, and […]
At the close of the year of the first Second Amendment cert grant in nearly a decade (setting Caetano aside), there are half a dozen petitions that have been discussed at conference and are awaiting the Court’s resolution of NYSRPA. That resolution could come next week, or it could take another 6 months. But one […]
Two weeks ago, the Center was fortunate to host an event in Washington, D.C. on the oral arguments in NYSRPA. Like much of the commentary on this blog, and from Center leadership in media outlets, the focus was both on the signals from NYSRPA about the current justices’ approach to Second Amendment questions and about […]
Another relatively quiet week on the Court’s gun docket. Two cases became fully briefed: Guedes which concerns the Trump Administration’s bump stock ban, and Worman, which concerns Massachusetts’s ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Guedes was distributed for conference in January, but Worman has not yet been scheduled for conference. (Lastly, I’ll just note […]
After all the excitement the last few weeks, it has been quiet at the Court for gun cases. No new petitions were filed this week, and we’ve seen no more movement on any of the pending ones. It also seems that NYSRPA is more than likely going to take a few more weeks or months, […]
After oral arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, we’ve been poring over the transcript, listening to the audio, and reading all the reactions from Court watchers and others inside the room. We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks (including tomorrow night at our event in D.C. […]
Two new student notes were recently published in their law reviews’ November issues. These articles add important insights to highly relevant areas of Second Amendment law that are still very much in flux. Check them out below with their abstracts excerpted.
This post-NYSRPA week saw some more action at the Court. No new grants or orders in NYSRPA—though it’s possible we may get more orders on Tuesday this week. But the Supreme Court did deny cert in two pending petitions on the chart below, one of which was surprising to me. In that case, Medina v. […]
