I just finished Kathleen Belew’s excellent book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, and one story there stuck out to me. It’s a story about racist violence motivating stricter gun regulations with particular resonance for this moment. In 1979, a small group of Black protesters was marching in protest of […]
What can armed protest teach about the case for gun regulation? Reva Siegel and I have just posted our article, When Guns Threaten the Public Sphere: Recovering the Common Law Approach to Public Safety, which is forthcoming as part of the Northwestern Law Review symposium the Center co-sponsored this past fall. Here is the abstract: […]
When I began the research for my recent book, Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment, my goal was to understand the origins of American gun laws. I was hardly alone in this, of course; there is an enormous amount of contemporary research on the original goals of the Second Amendment, […]
Judge Amy Coney Barrett opened her dissent in Kanter v. Barr by identifying a historical principle underlying modern gun regulation: “History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns.” She went on to suggest that dangerousness is the Second Amendment’s exclusive limiting principle, such […]
In 2020, the Virginia legislature passed a host of new gun regulations: limiting purchases of handguns to one a month, requiring the reporting of lost/stolen firearms, giving local autonomy over gun restrictions on government property, creating an extreme risk protection (aka red flag) law, and others. These new laws, in a state that had previously […]
Second Amendment scholars naturally spend a great deal of time and energy focusing on questions about the history of gun rights and regulation, but less time investigating questions about how that history is or should be presented to the public in venues like museum exhibits. Historian Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan) has done as much as any […]
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 […]
Parking lot laws, also called “bring your gun to work” or “guns-at-work” laws, are state laws that prohibit property owners or employers from preventing individuals from storing firearms in their parked vehicles in the property owner or employer’s parking area. These laws subordinate employers and property owners’ right to regulate their own property to the […]
In 1720, writer and self-designated medical expert Joseph Browne published his A Practical Treatise of the Plague, in which he extolled the benefits of the “firing of Guns, especially Cannon” to “purify” an atmosphere laden with pestilence. In recommending this approach, Browne had significant company. It appears that igniting gunpowder had been the folk medicine […]
