The Yale Law Journal

Second Amendment

Forum

History and Tradition’s Equality Problem

Cary Franklin

This Essay identifies a key feature of the Court’s new history-and-tradition doctrine that has not yet attracted significant attention: outcomes in history-and-tradition cases (involving guns, abortion, etc.) are often driven by hidden, contemporary judgments about equality—judgments whose implicati…

Forum

What It Takes to Write Statutes that Hold the Firearms Industry Accountable to Civil Justice

Heidi Li Feldman

This Essay defends statutes creating public nuisance and consumer protection causes of action against firearms industry actors for their failure to take reasonable measures to control the flow of their products to criminal users. Such laws are predicate statutes under PLCAA and do not infringe the S…

Article

Originalism-by-Analogy and Second Amendment Adjudication

Joseph Blocher & Eric Ruben

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn v. Bruen, the Supreme Court announced a novel historical-analogical approach to constitutional decisionmaking. The Court sought to constrain judicial discretion, but Bruen’s originalism-by-analogy has enabled judicial subjectivity, obfuscation, and unpredictabi…

Note

Antisubordinating the Second Amendment

Danny Y. Li

Racial-justice claims have played an enduring role in the movement and jurisprudential history of the contemporary Second Amendment. This Note argues that, far from a source of equal freedom, our modern expansionist Second Amendmentwhich reasons in the register of history and traditionreinforces c…

Article

Bans

Joseph Blocher

Courts have often suggested that “bans” are per se unconstitutional. But what makes a regulation a ban and why should it matter? This Article addresses those questions, which are particularly pressing as the Supreme Court prepares to hear its first Second Amendment case in nearly a decade.