Authoruclalaw

What will happen after District of Columbia v. Heller? We know that five justices on the Supreme Court now oppose comprehensive federal prohibitions on home handgun possession by some class of trustworthy homeowners for the purpose of, and maybe only at the time of, self-defense. Perhaps the justices will push further and apply Heller’s holding to state and local governments via the Fourteenth...

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller through the lens of post-Roe judicial conservatism, a doctrine that exalts judicial deference to the political branches above the interest in individual liberty. But that vision is incompatible with the sort of judiciary the Framers established, and Wilkinson’s prescription does not...

In this Article, I argue that the Heller majority, in discovering a new Second Amendment right to possess guns for personal self-defense, engaged in an unprincipled abuse of judicial power in pursuit of an ideological objective. The ideological nature of Justice Scalia’s opinion is revealed in his inconsistent brand of textualism, in which Scalia’s own longtime insistence on the importance of...

The Second Amendment right to arms was uniformly viewed as an individual right from the time it was proposed in the late eighteenth century until legal debate over gun controls began in the twentieth century. This Essay seeks to illuminate major late twentieth century contributions to that debate.

In recent years the gun control movement has increasingly shifted its efforts from lobbying for new gun-control legislation to facilitating lawsuits against the gun industry, especially those based on claims of negligent distribution of firearms. These lawsuits are based on the premise that organized gun trafficking, much of it involving corrupt or negligent licensed dealers, plays an important...

This Article considers whether and how originalism promotes the Constitution’s democratic legitimacy, in theory and in practice. In the late twentieth century, critics of the Warren and Burger courts argued that judicial review lacks democratic authority when judges depart from the original understanding of those who ratified the Constitution. Originalism’s critics objected that giving past...

This Essay speculates about the substance and timing of likely decisions by lower courts and the Supreme Court in dealing with issues left open by District of Columbia v. Heller. It suggests that lower courts will not address those issues by examining original understandings regarding permissible gun regulations, but will instead apply to such regulations something like an intermediate standard...

How should state and federal constitutional rights to keep and bear arms be turned into workable constitutional doctrine? I argue that unitary tests such as “strict scrutiny,” “intermediate scrutiny,” “undue burden,” and the like don’t make sense here, just as they don’t fully describe the rules applied to most other constitutional rights. Rather, courts should separately consider four different...