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 […]
Last Thursday, the Court issued Bruen, declaring NY’s concealed carry law unconstitutional. We’ll have much more coverage on the blog, starting later this week. Now, we’ll wait to see whether any of the held cases are taken up or sent back to lower courts. Petitions Pending Case Ct. Below Pet. Filed Implicated Law/Issue Status New […]
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 […]
It’s coming down to the last few weeks of the Term, and we’re expecting Bruen any day now. When the Court issues Bruen we will also get better insight into whether it plans to send the held cases back down or take one or more of them up. Petitions Pending Case Ct. Below Pet. Filed […]
A few weeks ago, Jake Charles raised an important point here when he compared the recent Eleventh Circuit decision in United States v. Jimenez-Shilon with Justice Thomas’ opinion, released the same day in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez: in contrast to the Eleventh Circuit’s purist text-and-history approach to the Second Amendment, which precludes the invocation of […]
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 its orders last week, the Court denied cert in the McCloskey’s Second Amendment challenge to their state bar discipline. There’s also one new cert petition based on a license revocation in D.C. Petitions Pending Case Ct. Below Pet. Filed Implicated Law/Issue Status New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (20-843) 2d Cir. […]
We’re very excited to report a newly approved Section on Firearms Law through the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), which “has the dual responsibility of serving law schools and their deans as their institutional membership organization, and individual law school faculty and administrators as their learned society.” The new Section, launched just a few […]
The Idaho Supreme Court recently held that the state could be held liable in a wrongful death action for negligently failing to add a name to the database used in gun purchase background checks. In Von Lossberg v. State, the parents of a young man who committed suicide with a gun sued the state, the […]