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Full-Text Articles in Law
Conflicting Reports: When Gun Rights Threaten Free Speech, Gregory P. Magarian
Conflicting Reports: When Gun Rights Threaten Free Speech, Gregory P. Magarian
Scholarship@WashULaw
This Article catalogs and analyzes collisions between free speech and gun rights. The most important and hotly debated of those collisions is the clash between the First Amendment rights to assemble and speak in public political protests and the asserted Second Amendment right to carry firearms openly in public places. Beyond protests, public university students’ First Amendment rights to speak and learn clash with the asserted Second Amendment right to carry concealed weapons on university campuses; First Amendment interests in robust political deliberation clash with Second Amendment interests in promoting and securing the right to keep and bear arms; and …
Political And Non-Political Speech And Guns, Gregory P. Magarian
Political And Non-Political Speech And Guns, Gregory P. Magarian
Scholarship@WashULaw
Constitutional rights depend on justifications. Some combination of theory, his- tory, and practical reasoning needs to establish why and to what extent a given right warrants legal protection. The justifications that courts and theorists articulate for a given right determine the right’s breadth and the specific contours of its protection. Justification has particular importance at the formative stage of a newly recognized constitutional right. At present, courts are building doctrine around the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear Arms,”1 recognized as an individ- ual right just over a decade ago in District of Columbia v. Heller.2 …
Speaking Truth To Firepower: How The First Amendment Destabilizes The Second, Gregory P. Magarian
Speaking Truth To Firepower: How The First Amendment Destabilizes The Second, Gregory P. Magarian
Scholarship@WashULaw
When the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, it set atop the federal judicial agenda the critical task of elaborating the new right’s scope, limits, and content. Following Heller, commentators routinely draw upon the First Amendment’s protections for expressive freedom to support their proposals for Second Amendment doctrine. In this article, Professor Magarian advocates a very different role for the First Amendment in explicating the Second, and he contends that our best understanding of First Amendment theory and doctrine severely diminishes the Second Amendment’s …