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 […]
Robert Cottrol and Ray Diamond have posted on SSRN a new piece on Public Safety and the Right to Bear Arms. In the piece, Cottrol and Diamond provide a detailed and thorough examination of the debates and historical understanding that influenced codification of the Second Amendment and its interpretation in the ensuing years, decades, and […]
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, the first gun case to reach the high court in almost a decade, gun rights advocates pushed their conception of the scope of the right in a novel direction. The city regulation being challenged in the case restricted New […]
Much of the oral argument in NYSRPA v. New York City dealt with mootness: whether there was even a case or controversy before the court, as required by Article III of the United States Constitution. But someday, whether in NYSRPA or some other case, the Court will have to address the question of which method […]
I’ve written previously about the surprising agreement among courts of appeals interpreting and applying the Second Amendment. They all agree, for instance, that the standard two-part framework is the best way to analyze Second Amendment challenges. Under that framework, the first question is whether the challenged law burdens conduct protected by the Constitution; if it […]
Ninety years ago today, in the December edition of American Rifleman, the National Rifle Association (NRA) published the editorial “Merry Christmas—And Gun Laws.” The editorial’s anniversary is noteworthy for two reasons. First, its publication marked the first time that the NRA provided guidance as to the types of firearms legislation the organization would and would […]
Gun policy change in America seems to have come to a fork in the road: on the one hand, the forces favoring stronger gun laws have become more numerous, more vocal, and arguably more successful. On the other hand, the infusion of new, very conservative judicial appointments coming from the Trump administration who seem to […]
