Law Commons^™

The Gun Rights Movement And 'Arms' Under The Second Amendment, Eric M. Ruben

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

After Donald Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6 wielding weapons including tasers, chemical sprays, knives, police batons, and baseball bats, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) remarked that the insurrection “didn’t seem . . . armed.” Johnson, who is A-rated by the National Rifle Association (NRA), observed, “When you hear the word ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms?” For many, the answer is likely yes.

This essay describes how the gun rights movement has contributed to the conflation of arms and firearms. In doing so, it shows how that conflation is flatly inconsistent with the most important legal context …

Cause And Effect In Antidiscrimination Law, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Standards of causation in antidiscrimination law, and disparate-treatment cases in particular, are deeply flawed. Their defects have caused an illogical, obscure, and unworkable proof scheme that requires an overhaul to curb the harm that it engenders and to allow the antidiscrimination statutes to serve their objectives effectively. This Article proposes a theory and method of causation that achieves this goal. The problem stems from the inadequacies associated with current standards of causation in disparate-treatment cases—the but-for test and the motivating-factor test. The proposed “factorial” approach introduces a causal standard that addresses these inadequacies. It entails three innovations over current causation …