This guest post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. Part II: Bruen as Precedent My previous post argued that we shouldn’t take for granted that the interpretive protocol embedded within a Supreme Court decision exerts binding force in future cases. That position has implications for how courts ought to construe Bruen’s statement that the applicable case law “requires courts to assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.” It’s worth noting that other Supreme Court decisions are ..read more

This guest post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. In the 2022 case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that New York unlawfully required citizens to demonstrate a special need to receive a license to carry a handgun. The Justices reached their conclusion by asking whether the law at issue was “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Looking ahead, the Justices instructed courts to conduct the same inquiry in future disputes over gun laws. A regulation’s lawfulness ..read more

This guest post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. The eyes of the world are on the catastrophe that has been unfolding in Israel/Palestine with the Hamas attack on October 7th and the war it has engendered in the Gaza strip and across the region. But the impact of these events reaches much deeper than the battlefield, accelerating myriad social and legal processes within Israel. One conspicuous site of such developments is Israeli firearms law, which is undergoing a rapid transformation. In this post, I outline these developments. There are grave con ..read more

On November 3, 2023, the Center co-hosted a symposium at Notre Dame Law School in partnership with the Notre Dame Law Review on the theme of History, Tradition, and Analogical Reasoning. The symposium brought together leading legal scholars, historians and practitioners to discuss pressing questions surrounding Bruen’s historical-analogical test.  Symposium participants presented on topics ranging from psychological perspectives on analogical reasoning, to traditionalism and general law within Bruen’s framework, to the issues implicated by the pending Second Amendment challenge in Rahimi ..read more

The Court isn’t set to issue an orders list this morning; rather, the final list of the calendar year will come next Monday, December 11.  The major case to watch from a Second Amendment perspective is Range, which was mentioned at the Rahimi oral argument and is clearly on the minds of some justices.  On November 15, a pro se petition was filed in Nichols v. Newsom—a Second Amendment challenge to various California public carry regulations (including state restrictions on how and when guns can be kept or carried within 1,000 feet of a school and the state’s ban on open carry ..read more

This guest post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. In the past year, federal district courts across America have seen Bruen-fueled challenges to all manner of gun regulation. Whether the topic is a firearm insurance mandate, an administrative rule reclassifying certain pistols as rifles, or restrictions on carrying guns in “sensitive places,” the challengers’ strategy is usually the same: argue that the regulated activity falls within the plain text of the Second Amendment, then make the government prove that the regulation fits within a historical tr ..read more

The amicus briefs filed in support of Rahimi at the Supreme Court include a wide variety of arguments against the constitutionality of the federal domestic violence restraining order ban in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8)—some of which received substantial airtime during the oral argument earlier this month, and some of which did not.  While many amici focus on the Fifth Circuit’s application of Bruen’s historical Second Amendment test, others do not address the Second Amendment at all.  Rather, these briefs emphasize alleged due process and procedural shortcomings or argue that, as a threshol ..read more

There’s not much activity to report on this week due to the holiday.  The Range petition, which was distributed for consideration at the November 17 conference, appears to still be under review and the Court is not expected to issue an orders list this morning.  In Daniels (an as-applied challenge to the federal ban on gun possession by unlawful users of controlled substances), the respondent filed his brief in opposition on November 20.  Daniels asks the Court to reject the government’s petition for review, arguing against an approach where history and tradition ..read more

The Court released an orders list this morning but there is no order yet in Range, which was considered at last Friday’s conference.  The response in United States v. Daniels – an as-applied Second Amendment challenge to the federal ban on gun possession for unlawful users of controlled substances by a regular marijuana user – is due today.  On November 9, a petition was filed in Caulkins v. Pritzker.  The case is a wide-ranging challenge to Illinois’ recently-enacted assault weapons and high capacity magazine ban, the Protect Illinois Communities Act or PICA.  Th ..read more

[The scholarship highlighted in this post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.] On November 3, the Center for Firearms Law hosted its annual law review symposium at Notre Dame Law School in partnership with Notre Dame Law Review on the topic of History, Tradition, and Analogical Reasoning.  The symposium brought together leading legal scholars, historians and practitioners to discuss pressing questions surrounding Bruen’s historical-analogical test.  A full recap of the event, including video recordings of the panel discussions, will run on th ..read more