[Ed. Note: As we discussed here, this post is part of a three-part series on gun laws in the Center’s Repository of Historical Gun Laws, written by Center research assistant Catie Carberry. This post, like the Repository, is exemplary and not exhaustive.]
Are laws banning aliens from keeping guns a “post-World War I phenomenon?”
This week, we’re fortunate to have a three-part series by one of the Center’s excellent summer research assistants, Catie Carberry. Catie’s posts will provide an overview of the historical gun laws in the Center’s Repository of Historical Gun Laws, the largest publicly available single-site compilation of historical regulations of firearms. The Repository is the result of more than four years of painstaking research, but makes no claim to completeness. Rather than purport to include every firearm-related law (an impossible task), it is designed to provide a broad, deep, and representative sample of the kinds of gun laws that have existed throughout English and American history.
Jake Charles’ post yesterday noted that a great many foundational cases in the constitutional curriculum—Lopez, Printz, Curtiss-Wright, and Cruikshank, to name a few—involve gun laws. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they’re best understood as firearms law cases, or that the subject matter of the laws had much to do with the constitutional holdings (though perhaps in Curtiss-Wright it did). But Jake’s post does help illustrate some of the ways in which firearms law intersects with other areas of doctrine, even if does so sub silentio.
In February, the Charleston Law Review hosted a symposium on “The Second Amendment 228 Years Later.” Papers from that symposium were just recently published to Westlaw. Unfortunately, I don’t see the articles publicly available for free, except for those on SSRN, but below I’ll post the citations for this interesting set of papers to come out of that Symposium.
Second Amendment scholarship has changed dramatically in its substance, style, diversity, and depth. Many elements of that transformation are hard to quantify, but others—including the sheer increase in volume—are more susceptible to rough-and-ready empirical snapshots.
Welcome to the blog for the Center for Firearms Law at Duke Law School. The blog will highlight important cases, scholarship, research, and other news about the Second Amendment and the broader debates over gun rights and regulation. Like the Center, the blog aims to present controversial issues in a fair, nonpartisan, and balanced way. If you have comments, feedback, or suggestions for topics to cover, you can reach out to the contributors, email the Center, or tweet at us on Twitter (@DukeFirearmsLaw).