Copyright & Reuse

This Repository is meant to facilitate research and scholarship. To that end, we offer the following guidance for users on copyright and reuse of the materials found here.

The Repository primarily consists of the text of statutes and associated metadata that identifies and describes those statutes. Most of this metadata is not protected by copyright because it either expresses only objective facts (which are not original) or constitutes expression so limited by the number of ways the underlying ideas can be expressed that such expression has merged with those ideas.

Likewise, the statutory texts included here are edicts of government and are themselves not subject to copyright protection. However, to encourage reuse of this metadata and to remove doubt about reuse, we hereby waive any and all copyright in the contents of this database under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

You are free to reuse the metadata and the statutory texts you find on this site however you wish. However, we encourage you, when reasonably possible, to attribute your use as follows:

“Repository of Historical Gun Laws, Duke University School of Law, https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/”.