Second Amendment Commons^™

State V. Ortiz, 317 A.3d 737 (R.I. 2024), Samantha Barnes

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Domestic Violence Offenders Don't Give Up Their Guns, Natalie Nanasi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Perpetrators of intimate partner violence are barred by federal law and many states' laws from possessing firearms. While such prohibitions enjoy popular support, they are sporadically and inconsistently enforced, placing the lives of survivors at risk when offenders do not voluntarily comply. Many experts, including this author, have offered legal and policy solutions to increase the likelihood that perpetrators of domestic violence will either willingly relinquish their guns or otherwise be dispossessed of them. But these proposals may have been premature.

This Article is the first to take a step back and inquire why offenders do not surrender their firearms …

Editor's Notes On Special Issue: The National Firearms Act

Wyoming Law Review

No abstract provided.

Take It Or Leavitt: The Criminal Consequences Of Doing The Right Thing, Eva Lynch

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

Technologies Of Violence: Law, Markets, And Innovation For Gun Safety, Joseph Blocher, Christopher Buccafusco

Faculty Scholarship

Violence in the United States is distinctive in many ways, perhaps none more visceral and fundamental than the technologies with which it is practiced. American violence disproportionately involves guns, and because guns are such an effective tool of violence, confrontations involving them are disproportionately deadly. Decades of research confirm this "instrumentality effect, " and it is reflected in the broad, bipartisan agreement that the nation has a gun violence problem. The deep disagreement, of course, remains about how to address it, with most of the debate focused on regulating who can carry which guns, where, and how.

But fully understanding, …

Consensus And Conflict Over Context: Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The Supreme Court's 2024-25 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Elena Schultz

Articles

In its 2024-2025 Term, the Supreme Court emphasized the utility—and necessity—of context-based, fact-sensitive analyses throughout its criminal law and procedure cases. Though the Justices sparred over how to derive meaning from factual, structural, legal, and historical contexts, they tended to agree that courts should not be artificially restricted from considering the breadth of the record before them.

Loyalty Disarmament And The Undocumented, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

Since the Supreme Court's District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008, lower federal courts have wrestled with Second Amendment claims raised by categories of people excluded from gun possession. Among those cases, several have been brought by noncitizens challenging their prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5), the federal criminal ban on possession by unlawfully present noncitizens. In the post-Heller § 922(g)(5) cases, judges have opined on whether unlawfully present noncitizens were among "the people" who had the right to bear arms and whether the government regulation met the appropriate level of constitutional scrutiny. More recently, however, the Supreme Court …

Dangerousness And The Undocumented, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

The Supreme Court's most recent Second Amendment opinion, United States v. Rahimi, centers the question of dangerousness in right to bear arms challenges. There, the Court upheld 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), the federal criminal prohibition on possession of firearms by those subject to a civil domestic violence order, opining that legislatures could regulate the right to bear arms of those who were proven credible threats to public safety. Rahimi, however, left open the question whether dangerousness might be imputed to an entire group, absent individual determinations of threat or danger. The several lower federal court cases adjudicating 18 U.S.C. § …

History's Identity Crisis, Allison Orr Larsen

Faculty Publications

Lower court judges across the country are struggling to manage the Supreme Court’s new “history and tradition” test that applies to Second Amendment challenges. This Article articulates one fundamental reason for the struggle: nobody is quite sure what a judge is actually doing when she evaluates claims about what happened in the past. Is it traditional legal reasoning— weighing evidence and looking for patterns? Is it fact-finding of the sort we think expert historians should testify about—conveying to a trial judge the best evidence we have about the purpose of colonial gun laws? Or is it a different sort of …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Voting Matters: Materiality Considerations And The Shareholder Vote, Renee M. Jones

Seattle University Law Review

For the shareholder franchise to have meaning, shareholders must have access to relevant information to inform their voting decisions. The securities laws’ disclosure requirements play an essential role in informing the shareholder vote.

This Essay focuses on the question of the materiality of information in the context of shareholder voting. It addresses the question of whether ESG-related information is material, positioning the materiality inquiry within the context of shareholders’ voting decisions. It explores the definition of materiality with a focus on the “reasonable investor” concept embedded within the definition. The Essay argues that the implicit expectations of many commentators that …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Understanding The Big Three’S Wavering Support Of Environmental And Social Shareholder Proposals, Jeff Schwartz, Jefferson Jensen

Seattle University Law Review

Because of their substantial equity portfolios, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the Big 3) are central players in corporate governance. It is, therefore, critical to understand how they vote. One puzzle is that their support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social matters appears to waiver. In 2020, for instance, BlackRock supported 11.1% of environmental proposals at S&P 500 firms. In 2021, it seemingly reversed course, supporting 55.2%. It then flipped again, supporting 32.1% in 2022. Such statistics suggest that the Big 3 are constantly changing their views on these topics. This Article seeks to better understand whether this is …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

History And Tradition As Heightened Scrutiny, Andrew Willinger

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is turning to methodologies privileging text, history, and tradition, or THT, to interpret and implement various constitutional provisions. The Court has recently endorsed historically-focused approaches to determine how the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and carry a firearm, how the First Amendment protects the rights to free speech and freedom of religion, and whether the Due Process Clause protects reproductive autonomy, among other questions.

Much scholarship and popular commentary surrounding THT portrays the methodology as sui generis: presenting unique analytical challenges and impervious to direct comparison to existing doctrinal approaches. However, the jurist most …

Structural Originalism: A Second Amendment Case Study, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

“Originalism” is having a national moment, even if it is not entirely clear what the word means. What should we be originalist about? The leading academic approach asks us to parse the communicative content of text ratified in a very different linguistic culture; then construct a modern legal meaning consistent with our semantic speculations. Too often the result enforces policy judgments made in a radically different moral and technological world. This makes very little sense.

In this paper I recommend a more perspicuous and coherent use of constitutional history, which I call “structural originalism.” Rather than saddle ourselves with the …

We The People, But Not You: The Eighth Circuit Says Undocumented Immigrants Are Not Part Of “The People” Who May Bear Arms, Caleb Kearney

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Ghost Guns: A Case Study On The Tension Between Public Exigencies And Statutory Construction, Bradley Krause

Catholic University Law Review

Administrative agencies often navigate public policy issues while simultaneously handling complex and highly technical matters. When facing a public emergency, how should courts interpret these agencies’ authorizing statutes? What rules of thumb exist to guide the courts? This Comment answers these questions through a case study on ongoing litigation pertaining to a recent ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) regulation. The regulation, targeted towards ghost guns (also known as “privately manufactured firearms”), seeks to incorporate these weapons within pre-existing definitions in the ATF’s authorizing statute, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA). In spite of challenges to the regulation, …

A Conversation With Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Brett M. Kavanaugh, J. Joel Alicea

Catholic University Law Review

On Thursday, September 26th, 2024, the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at The Catholic University of America hosted a conversation between Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and Professor J. Joel Alicea. This was the inaugural event of the new Center. The conversation covered topics such as constitutional interpretation, the separation of powers, religious liberty, and the Catholic intellectual tradition. This is a transcript of the conversation, and the text appears substantially as it was delivered. The video of the event may be found at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sKvSwzkmqo.

Will Bruen Kill Cops?, Peter N. Salib, Guha Krishnamurthi

Fordham Law Review Online

Criminal procedure is a balancing act. On one hand, it must allow law enforcement officers to protect the public and themselves. On the other hand, criminal procedure must safeguard citizens’ individual constitutional rights—privacy, physical liberty, and bodily integrity. And now, the right to bear arms.

There is a serious tension here. Landmark Fourth Amendment cases like Terry v. Ohio, Pennsylvania v. Mimms, and Chimel v. California give the police wide latitude to seize firearms on the assumption that guns are dangerous. But these doctrines largely evolved before the Second Amendment’s ascendance. In District of Columbia v. Heller, …