This post is part of a mini-symposium on “Private Property and the Second Amendment,” which includes Jake Charles’ post Bruen, Private Property & the Second Amendment, and Robert Leider’s post Pretextually Eliminating the Right to Bear Arms through Gerrymandered Property Rules. Stay tuned for additional response posts that will run on the blog in the […]
This is a guest post that is part of a mini-symposium on “Private Property and the Second Amendment,” responding to Jake Charles’ earlier post Bruen, Private Property & the Second Amendment. Stay tuned for additional response posts that will run on the blog in the coming weeks. When the Supreme Court required public school desegregation […]
In the decade and a half since Heller, there has been a considerable amount of scholarship and litigation about the spaces where the Second Amendment extends. Bruen settled some of those questions by granting a right to publicly carry with no showing of need. And it suggested there could be permissible restrictions in certain sensitive […]
Last Monday, many of us awoke to the terrible news about a shooting at the University of Virginia on Sunday night that left three students dead and two others injured. Another public college not far away, Virginia Tech, was the site of a horrific mass shooting in 2007 that killed 32 people and injured 17 […]
After New York moved quickly post-Bruen to amend its gun laws to institute new application requirements and designate additional locations as sensitive places where guns are banned, the expectation was that other former may-issue states would follow suit. That largely has not transpired yet, and New York’s law—including many of its locational restrictions—was temporarily restrained […]
In recent weeks, the Center has devoted a great deal of space to covering the legal implications of the Bruen decision, including how lower courts in New York, Virginia, Texas, and other jurisdictions have started to apply its history-focused framework. But what about Bruen’s practical implications? Has the decision impacted the number of people seeking […]
On October 6, Judge Glenn T. Suddaby of the Northern District of New York issued a decision partially granting a request for a temporary restraining order of New York’s revised gun law (the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, or CCIA). The CCIA was passed on July 1, about a week after Bruen, and took effect on […]
We previously summarized the preliminary injunction briefing in Antonyuk v. Bruen, a challenge to New York’s amended gun laws. Following a hearing on August 23, Chief Judge Glenn T. Suddaby of the Northern District of New York denied the preliminary injunction motion and dismissed the case for lack of standing in an August 31 decision. […]
Jake recently covered the Northern District of Texas decision in Firearms Policy Coalition v. McGraw, which struck down Texas’ ban on the public carry of handguns by those under 21 years old. In McGraw, the court reasons that the Second Amendment’s reference to a “well regulated militia” means that the amendment must necessarily protect the […]
Last week, in Firearms Policy Coalition v. McCraw, Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas struck down a Texas law that prohibited those under 21 from carrying handguns in public. The case illustrates many of the hallmarks that are likely to characterize post-Bruen litigation over contemporary gun laws. […]
Last month, in Board of Regents v. Montana, the Montana Supreme Court unanimously held that the state’s Board of Regents has the exclusive power to regulate firearms on Montana University System (MUS) campuses. The litigation involved a challenge to Montana House Bill No. 102 (HB 102), which would have allowed the possession and carrying of […]
Immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen striking down New York’s proper-cause permitting standard, New York Governor Kathy Hochul took to Twitter to call the decision “reckless[]” and “outrageous,” and pledged further action “to keep New Yorkers safe.” Just over one week after the decision was issued, on Friday, July 1, New York state […]
We previously reviewed and commented on Justice Thomas’ opinion for the Court and the three concurrences in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This post is a deeper dive into the dissent, which stridently criticized the Court’s historical-tradition methodology as both dismissive of modern legislative objectives and unworkable in practice. The […]
Jake previously summarized and reviewed Justice Thomas’ opinion for the Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This post unpacks the three concurrences, which potentially shed light on the scope of the Court’s holding and the “historical tradition” of regulation that will be relevant in future Second Amendment cases. Justice Alito […]
Last month, in Juzumas v. Nassau County, a Second Circuit panel ruled per curiam that New York’s statute governing licenses for firearm possession mandated that the defendant surrender his longarms once his pistol license was revoked. However, because the County policy purporting to implement this policy was unclear, the Court vacated the district court’s ruling […]
On June 23, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its first major Second Amendment decision in a dozen years. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court declared New York’s restrictive may-issue licensing law unconstitutional. The 6-3 decision written by Justice Thomas supercharges the Second Amendment and upends a host of settled […]
Yesterday the Supreme Court issued its Bruen decision, holding that NY’s strict concealed carry law is unconstitutional and mandating that lower courts assess Second Amendment claims by reference only to history. We’ll be writing much more about it here, but today we have the Center’s annual firearms law works-in-progress workshop, so I’ll just post a link […]
As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen—which will address the extent to which states can regulate public carry through licensing—the question of whether states can prohibit firearms in specific locations has become increasingly salient. During the Bruen oral argument, the justices posed hypothetical questions as to whether states could restrict firearms […]
The title of Saul Cornell’s recent blog post—The Myth of Non-enforcement of Gun Laws in Nineteenth Century America—leaves the impression that I will argue that nineteenth-century gun restrictions went unenforced. I will make no such argument. In some places, laws regulating the carrying of weapons were enforced strictly. In others, they were ignored. Some authorities […]
In his Bruen oral argument, former solicitor general Paul Clement erroneously claimed that there was no evidence of enforcement of restrictive gun laws before the Civil War. The non-enforcement thesis is the latest example of ideology distorting Second Amendment scholarship. Indeed, during the oral argument in Bruen, Justice Breyer took the unusual step of characterizing […]
There’s been a spate of new Second Amendment scholarship, including a just published piece by the Center’s own Joseph Blocher (with co-author Eric Ruben). There are also a couple of wide-ranging student pieces skeptical about/supportive of different gun regulations. Eric Ruben & Joseph Blocher, “Second-Class” Rhetoric, Ideology, and Doctrinal Change, 110 Geo. L.J. 613 (2022) […]
Many states are becoming territorial about their residents. So territorial, in fact, that at least some legislators are proposing ways to functionally use their state’s criminal code extraterritorially. Proposals to criminalize conduct that facilitates women seeking abortion care outside the state have cropped up in Missouri. Other states target different sorts of conduct they deem […]
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), codified at 15 U.S.C. § 7901 et seq., has nearly banished the specter of civil liability for covered gun industry entities. PLCAA was predicated on the claim that gun industry actors, including firearm manufacturers and sellers, were under siege from baseless lawsuits founded on novel legal […]
On March 18th, the Center hosted a conference at the law school on Privatizing the Gun Debate. We were grateful to be joined by a dozen scholars, practitioners, and public officials to discuss the ways that firearms are increasingly being regulated outside legislative channels through actions like tort lawsuits and business policies. The keynote address was deliver […]
On his Legal Theory blog, Larry Solum recently highly recommend a piece by Frederick Schauer & Barbara A. Spellman, Precedent and Similarity, forthcoming in T. Endicott, H. Kristjansson & S. Lewis (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Precedent (Oxford University Press). The piece describes a problem endemic in legal reasoning—the difficulty of establishing just what makes one […]
