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Second Amendment

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Series

2024

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

One Year Post-Bruen: An Empirical Assessment, Eric Ruben, Rosanna Smart, Ali Rowhani-Rahbar Jan 2024

One Year Post-Bruen: An Empirical Assessment, Eric Ruben, Rosanna Smart, Ali Rowhani-Rahbar

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the year after New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a steady stream of highly publicized opinions struck down a wide range of previously upheld gun restrictions. Courts declared unconstitutional policies ranging from assault weapon bans to domestic abuser prohibitions to various limits on publicly carrying handguns. Those opinions can frequently be paired with others reaching the opposite conclusion. The extent to which Bruen shook up the Second Amendment landscape and has caused widespread confusion in the courts is starting to come into focus.

This Essay measures Bruen’s aftereffects by statistically analyzing a year’s worth …


Scientific Context, Suicide Prevention, And The Second Amendment After Bruen, Eric Ruben Jan 2024

Scientific Context, Suicide Prevention, And The Second Amendment After Bruen, Eric Ruben

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court declared in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen that modern gun laws must be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” to survive Second Amendment challenges. Scholarship has shown how this test of historical analogy presents difficulties because of how technological, legal, and social change has shaped policy over the centuries. This Article is the first to assess Bruen as it applies to suicide- prevention laws, and, in doing so, illuminates another form of change that complicates Bruen’s implementation: scientific progress.

As this Article shows, early generations of Americans fundamentally misunderstood mental …