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.
As part of our ongoing Scholarship Highlight video series, I recently talked with Greg Wallace, Professor of Law at Campbell University Law School. We discussed his article “‘Assault Weapon’ Lethality,” which is forthcoming in the Tennessee Law Review. Here’s a short excerpt from the introduction of his piece (with footnotes omitted) and below is our […]
With the issuance of its final opinions last week, the Supreme Court has wrapped up OT 2019. The Term began last October with an optimistic gun-rights community. The Court had granted review in a Second Amendment case for the first time since 2016, and was poised to hear arguments in such a case for the […]
The articles from a symposium hosted University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy on the Second Amendment are now published and on Westlaw. They include some interesting new empirical pieces and other doctrinal/jurisprudential ones, including one article by my colleague Darrell Miller.
In their fascinating 2001 Article in the Duke Law Journal, “Super-Statutes,” William Eskridge and John Ferejohn described how some statutes are more important than other ordinary pieces of legislation, like those that settle the budget or cover a narrow and specific topic. Some intend to and do in fact “penetrate public normative and institutional culture […]
In 2013, Colorado passed into law a new gun regulation that prohibits the sale, transfer, or possession of large-capacity magazines (LCMs) acquired after July 1, 2013. The law defines LCMs as those ammunition feeding devices that accept more than 15 rounds. A group of gun owners and gun-rights organizations challenged the law as a violation […]
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision in June Medical Services v. Russo. Five justices voted to strike down a Louisiana law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. But while Chief Justice Roberts was one of these votes, he did not join the opinion […]
A few weeks ago, the Court denied all the pending Second Amendment cert petitions. I dove into Justice Thomas’s dissent from the decision in one of those cases and what we can next expect from the Court here. Since the Court is nearing the end of its current Term, we won’t hear more news for […]
In a recent article in the Chicago Law Review, The Origins of Substantive Due Process, Ilan Wurman argues against the notion that antebellum courts enforced limits on state or local legislative power through a doctrine of substantive due process. Instead, limits on this legislative power—apart from state constitutional rights guarantees—operated through three principal doctrines: (1) […]
Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court in October 2018, taking over the seat from retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. In January 2019, after nearly a decade of declining to hear a Second Amendment case, the Court granted review in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York. Many observers—myself certainly included—thought […]
Wow – big news out of the Supreme Court’s order list this morning. The Court denied *every* pending Second Amendment cert petition. Justice Thomas, joined in part by Justice Kavanaugh, dissented from the cert denial in Rogers. This outcome was one possibility I highlighted last week, though I thought then such a possibility was unlikely. […]
