The Second Amendment: Gun Rights and Regulation

Approach

This casebook provides a comprehensive overview of the Second Amendment from its historical roots in England and the colonies through the doctrinal transformations of the past seventeen years, including the watershed decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), as well as broader questions regarding gun rights and regulation and how they interact with other rights and interests.

The book is designed to meet a substantial demand among academics and law students for a balanced and accessible introduction to the field of firearms law and a synthesis of the emerging doctrine and theoretical foundations of the right to keep and bear arms.

Chapters

The casebook is structured in three major components.

Part I of the book, consisting of Chapters 1-3, provides background material to understand the debate in firearms law (Chapter 1), Heller’s significance (Chapter 2), and the Reconstruction-era context that leads to McDonald’s incorporation decision, that makes the Second Amendment applicable to states and localities as well as the federal government. (Chapter 3).

Part II, Chapters 4-7, examines the doctrine that has emerged around the Second Amendment in the past seventeen years in both the Supreme Court and the lower courts. It first covers the text, history and tradition approach the Court has adopted for Second Amendment cases after Bruen (Chapter 4). It then explores how this method works in specific doctrinal areas: Where weapons can be carried (Chapter 5), what weapons garner constitutional protection (Chapter 6), and who can invoke the Second Amendment right (Chapter 7).

Part III, Chapters 8-11, pursues themes dealing with the right to keep and bear arms more generally. It discusses the intersection of gun rights and issues of race, sex, and gender (Chapter 8), the way that the right to keep and bear arms interacts with other constitutional rights, like freedom of speech, religion, the right to vote, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches (Chapter 9). The next chapter discusses how gun rights are protected in myriad ways by ordinary statutes outside the Constitution, sometimes even more stringently than the protections provided by the Second Amendment itself (Chapter 10). Chapter 11 discusses the way civil litigants use tort lawsuits to seek accountability for the harmful use of firearms (Chapter 11).

Goals for the Book

An ideal firearms law course—and casebook—must accomplish three main tasks. First, it must adequately cover the Second Amendment foundations for the right. Second, it must identify the emerging doctrinal issues that working their way through the justice system after Heller and Bruen, both as to constitutional methodology and resolution of discrete issues about scope of the right and the boundaries of permissible regulation. Third and finally, a course on firearms law should address the various ways in which gun rights and regulation interact with other legal rights and interests. Although firearms law might once have been considered a niche field, it is increasingly clear that the role of guns in American life cannot be separated from other legal questions like equality, citizenship, and the freedom to engage in other constitutionally salient activities.

This product meets these goals—providing a resource for academics in need of materials and for students demanding instruction in this important and fast-developing field of law.

Duke Center for Firearms Law Videos

Imprint: Foundation Press
Series: University Casebook Series
Publication Date: 06/18/2025
Related Subject(s): Gun Rights