As I wrote about earlier this week, there’s been a lot of recent action around Michigan’s new restrictions on carrying firearms into polling places. Although the legal challenge was not framed in Second Amendment terms, the individuals and gun-rights advocacy groups who brought the lawsuit presented the case as a conflict between their right to […]
On October 16, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued a memo in her capacity as “chief election officer with supervisory control over local election officials in the performance of their duties.” In that memo, Benson “clarif[ied]” that open carrying of firearms at or within 100 feet of a polling place is prohibited. The directive […]
Barring some major unexpected events, the Supreme Court could well be back up to nine members within the next week. As others have written at length, that could have a monumental impact across myriad areas of law. One of those is the Second Amendment, and a new Justice Barrett will be joining a Court that […]
In the latest installment of our ongoing scholarship Scholarship Highlight Interview Series, I talked with David Patton, Executive Director of the Federal Defenders of New York, about his article Criminal Justice Reform and Guns: The Irresistible Movement Meets the Immovable Object, which was just published in the Emory Law Journal. Here is the abstract from […]
With a vote on Judge Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court likely to occur the week before the presidential election, the set of gun cases at the Court takes on heightened importance. There are a number that will be fully briefed in the coming months that a majority anxious to expand gun rights may find […]
In a decision earlier this week, Doe v. Governor of Pennsylvania, the Third Circuit rejected a facial due process challenge by two men whose mental health commitments rendered them ineligible to possess firearms. They challenged a Pennsylvania law that forbids anyone who has been “committed to a mental institution for inpatient care and treatment” under […]
With just a few years on the bench, Judge Barrett has already developed a surprisingly deep record on guns and the Second Amendment. These cases suggest a special solicitude for gun owners and users—and not just for the paradigmatic “law-abiding, responsible” ones. Indeed, in her Second Amendment and criminal law cases, she has several times […]
Because today’s a Supreme Court holiday, we won’t get the order list from last Friday’s conference until tomorrow at 9:30. When that list comes out we’ll be watching the Rodriguez case, which was relisted from last week’s conference. The rhetoric in the petition papers is heated (the petitioners call the decision below an example of […]
For the most recent scholarship highlight interview, I sat down with Kristin A. Goss (Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University) and Matthew J. Lacombe (Barnard College) to discuss their terrifically fascinating article, Do Courts Change Politics? Heller and the Limits of Policy Feedback Effects, recently published in the Emory Law Journal. Here is the […]
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, […]
