Former Center Executive Director. 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.
Still quiet on the gun front. The Court will consider Zaitzeff at its next conference, which for some reason isn’t for another few weeks. Petitions Pending Case Ct. Below Pet. Filed Implicated Law/Issue Status New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (20-843) 2d Cir. 17-Dec-20 Challenge to New York’s good cause public carry […]
A few weeks ago, in McDougall v. County of Ventura, a panel of the Ninth Circuit held that Ventura County’s early COVID-19 policies violated the Second Amendment. The majority opinion was fairly straightforward and enjoyed unanimous support from the three-judge panel: Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who wrote the opinion, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld, and Judge Ryan Nelson […]
In the past month, there’s been a flurry of wide-ranging student publications related to various issues in firearms law. Check them out! Ellen Stephano, Note, Living Heller: Large-Capacity Magazine Bans and the Circuit Courts’ Search for Clarity on Second Amendment Constitutional Scrutiny, 54 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 573 (2021) From the Introduction (footnotes omitted): The […]
It’s been a quiet few weeks at the Court. There are no new cert petitions, and we’re just waiting to see what the Court will do with Aposhian and, of course, Bruen. Petitions Pending Case Ct. Below Pet. Filed Implicated Law/Issue Status New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (20-843) 2d Cir. 17-Dec-20 […]
The curious happenings in the bump stock ban case, Aposhian v. Garland, continue. It has now been scheduled for four different Friday conferences, only to be rescheduled days before each time. I posed the question to some experts on Twitter, and some thought it could be either a justice writing a dissent (which normally happens […]
One notable development on the docket is that, after the Maryland attorney general waived a response to the petition challenging the state’s assault weapons ban, the Court called for a response. That move indicates at least some justices are interested in the case, and a recent analysis showed that in general a call for response […]
In its order list this week, the Supreme Court denied cert in P.Z. and Hatch. Although P.Z. seemed like quite a long shot to me, Hatch seemed to at least implicate issues the Court is adjudicating in Bruen, so if the Court held the case that wouldn’t be surprising. The case challenged a Minnesota law […]
We are excited to begin rolling out the essays from the Center’s recent roundtable on Race and Guns in America. The essays are impressively rich and thoughtful, offering various descriptions and diagnoses (and some prescriptions) for the persistent problems that arise in a country flooded with guns and saturated with systemic racism. Starting tomorrow, we […]
The first SCOTUS Gun Watch of the new year looks a lot like the last one of 2021. Unsurprisingly, there’s been no new action in the past week, but this Friday’s conference has two cases scheduled. I don’t think either of the two are particularly strong candidates for a hold or grant, but we’ll see […]
As we wrap up the year, below is our list of top 15 most read blog posts during 2021. Remarkably, every one of the top 10 posts was authored by a different contributor, including one from Center faculty affiliate Jeff Swanson, two from Center research assistants, one from the Center’s research affiliate Kat Albrecht, and […]
This is the last SCOTUS Gun Watch of the year. It has been an eventful one with the Bruen petition filed a full year ago, the petition granted in April and argument held in November. This next year will bring an opinion in Bruen and perhaps even more grants. Two more petitions were filed at […]
The RAND Corporation just released a new report, The Magnitude and Sources of Disagreement Among Gun Policy Experts. Both Center faculty co-directors, Joseph Blocher and Darrell Miller, participated as experts. The Report’s key findings include: (1) experts were divided on whether they favored more permissive or less permissive policies, with sharp differences on select laws […]
We’ve got our first case scheduled for a 2022 conference now. And the Court has several gun-related petitions that are set to come before it, including more bump stock cases. We’re still waiting to see what the Court does in Bruen. Because of the nature of the case, the Court is likely to continue working […]
This past Term, the Supreme Court had several Fourth Amendment cases that were structured around the significance of one’s home. In Lange v. California and Caniglia v. Strom, the Court confronted questions about how officers’ entry into a home affects the constitutional analysis. I’ve written on the Second Amendment/firearms law implications for both cases, including […]
A three judge panel of the Fifth Circuit upheld the federal bump stock ban yesterday. In a post last Wednesday, I noted how the Sixth Circuit en banc had split evenly on the legality of the bump stock ban, leaving in place the trial court’s decision upholding the regulation. The question doesn’t appear to be […]
The Court had been scheduled to hear one of the pending challenges to the federal bump stock ban at its conference last Friday, but it rescheduled that case to a later date. In the meantime, no new cert petitions have been filed, and I expect we are in for a quiet period from the Court. […]
Here are some new and interesting firearms law and adjacent pieces of scholarship published recently, including some really insightful student notes and an especially timely and in-depth look at the bump stock ban. Mia Romano & Dru Stevenson, Litigating the Bump-Stock Ban, 70 U. Kan. L. Rev. 243, (2021) From the Introduction: If a law […]
As I mentioned earlier this week, the en banc Sixth Circuit failed to reach consensus on the legality of the Trump Administration’s ban on bump stock devices, which convert semi-automatic firearms into weapons that can approximate the rate of fire of an automatic firearm. (If you’re unfamiliar with the operation of bump stocks, I’ve found […]
A few days ago, in Gun Owners of America v. Garland, the Sixth Circuit en banc split evenly over the legality of the Trump Administration’s ban on bump stocks. That split leaves the district court decision upholding the ban in effect. Gun Owners of America has already said it plans to seek Supreme Court review, […]
In mid-November, the Center hosted a roundtable discussion on Race and Guns in America. The conversation addressed difficult and timely issues surrounding issues of policing, public carry, vigilante actors, and self-defense. In January, we will be publishing the essays from the participants that came out of the event. From the discussion, it is clear those essays […]
In a major decision issued yesterday, the en banc Ninth Circuit upheld California’s ban on large-capacity magazines. By a 7-4 vote in Duncan v. Bonta, the court ruled that intermediate scrutiny applied to California’s law and that the provision was a reasonable fit with the government’s goal of preventing gun violence. I’ve previously written about […]
Next week, as the Court returns from break, it will hear argument in a consequential abortion case. That marks another in a term of high-profile cases touching on many contentious political issues. That larger context might very well influence how the Court decides Bruen–or at least the breadth or narrowness of the resulting opinion. We’ll […]
In the past few weeks, there’s been a few new pieces of interesting firearms law scholarship out. One focuses on the challenge to Heller from the corpus linguistics data unavailable at the time of the decision. The other argues that the historical record supports New York’s law under review in Bruen. James C. Phillips & […]
We are excited to announce our next symposium will be hosted at Harvard Law School on March 25, 2022 in coordination with the Harvard Law Review. The theme is Guns, Violence, and Democracy. The events of the past several years—including pandemic-produced uncertainty and economic instability, antiracism protests, and assaults on free and fair elections—have confirmed […]
As we wait for the Supreme Court’s opinion in Bruen to come down later this Term, I’m tracking not only what new Second Amendment challenges are filed, but which ones the Court decides to hold in an anticipation of the outcome in Bruen. Especially as we get closer to an opinion in the case, those […]
