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.
The amicus briefs supporting the State have now been filed in Bruen, and all the briefing is complete except for the challengers’ reply brief. In about a month (on Nov. 3), the Court will be hearing oral arguments in the case, and then sometime in the months after that we will have a new Second […]
The past few weeks have led to a host of new scholarship, including ones that centrally focus on issues of who the Second Amendment protects. Ben Ramberg, Prior Involuntary Institutionalization Does Not Justify a Lifetime Second Amendment Ban: An Originalist Approach to 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(4), Kansas Journal of Law & Pubic Policy, 2021 Forthcoming Abstract: […]
The State’s brief has now been filed in Bruen and we’re only one week away from the Supreme Court’s Long Conference, in which it will consider whether to take up several other pending Second Amendment challenges, including major challenge to open carry laws (Young), large-capacity magazine bans (ANRPC), and as-applied challenges to certain person-based prohibitors […]
Last week, the Supreme Court announced that it will be live-streaming oral arguments for the beginning of the term, which means that Bruen will be livestreamed at the Court’s website on November 3. The Center will have near-live coverage of arguments, and I may even live tweet (@JacobCharlesNC) through them if I can do so […]
The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has released a new film about Guns in America just in time for Constitution Day (Sept. 17). The short film includes a fair amount of perspective from all sides of the debate and is a great resource for a quick overview of the history and […]
In just three weeks, the Supreme Court will reconvene to consider all the pending cert petitions that accumulated over its summer recess. The Term officially begins in about a month, and it is shaping up to be a momentous one. On the Second Amendment front, we’re watching to see if the Court will take any […]
Friend of the blog (and occasional guest blogger) Dru Stevenson has posted a new article on SSRN, “In Defense of Felon-in-Possession Laws,” forthcoming in the Cardozo Law Review. In an era where the felon prohibitor is under attack from both the left (mainly on policy grounds) and the right (mainly on constitutional grounds, at least […]
I am especially happy to announce that the essays are now published from our fall 2020 symposium with the Northwestern University Law Review, The Second Amendment’s Next Chapter. The journal was terrific to work with—for both the symposium itself (which can be viewed here) and during the editing process for these essays. Below are the […]
Several more articles and works in progress have been published or posted publicly in the last few weeks. They all raise thought-provoking arguments, and I was especially interested to see Patrick Charles’s article (again, no relation to me) on guns and race–it adds new texture to the competing paradigms that characterize either all gun control […]
Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Superior Court sitting en banc heard oral arguments in Gustafson v. Springfield Inc., et al. This is a rehearing en banc in a case in which the original appellate panel became the first court (at least of which I am aware) to declare the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) […]
