On October 1, the University of California at Davis Law School, in partnership with Giffords Law Center, put together a fabulous hybrid in person/virtual symposium: “The 2nd Amendment at the Supreme Court: ‘700 Years of History’ and the Modern Effects of Guns in Public.” There were some terrific panels, and I learned a lot from […]
The original public meaning of texts like the Second Amendment, or of the 1328 Statute of Northampton, includes the social context, and social norms, of the relevant period. The semantic meaning of the words in these legal texts must be situated within the context of norms that people took for granted. The crucial role of […]
The complex relationship between firearms regulation and racial politics during Reconstruction will likely figure in the upcoming Supreme Court case, NYSRPA v. Bruen. Gun rights advocates have leaned heavily into the argument that gun control is inherently racist and was inescapably tainted by this insidious motive during Reconstruction. Unfortunately, this claim rests on a combination […]
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 Statute of Northampton of 1328 remains central to the current debate surrounding the limits and protections the Second Amendment provides to carry arms in public.[1] The Statute provided that “no man great nor small, of what condition soever he be, except the king’s servants in his presence…come before the King’s justices, or other of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Earlier this week, in Drummond v. Robinson Township, the Third Circuit concluded that a Pennsylvania township’s zoning changes plausibly violated the Second Amendment. At issue in the case were two changes that Robinson Township made to the rules governing property on which a shooting range had previously existed and on which a new owner wanted […]
As we gear up for the Supreme Court’s hearing of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in November, other firearms law and Second Amendment issues continue to be litigated in lower courts and debated in the literature. Here are new pieces that take on the issue of public carry (just recently posted to […]
In the upcoming Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (20-843), the petitioners and several accompanying amici are characterizing New York’s 1911 Sullivan Law as having deep anti-immigrant roots. In one section of petitioners’ brief it is alleged that “New York was at the forefront of this new wave of […]
