Teaching Firearms Law: One Big Opportunity and Three Pedagogical Challenges

The U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller ushered in a new era for the Second Amendment: one in which the right to keep and bear arms, long dormant as a matter of practical impact and even “embarrassing” as a matter of legal scholarship, vaulted into the front ranks of constitutional law. The Court itself has only revisited the Amendment a few times since then—albeit once by revolutionizing the doctrine. Meanwhile, lower courts have issued thousands of decisions giving shape to the right, while scholars have generated work that is increasingly deep, diverse, and challenging. We wrote our casebook, The Second Amendment: Gun Rights and Regulation, against the backdrop of that ongoing legal and scholarly revolution and have dedicated much of our academic careers to building up the scholarly field of firearms law.

In this short piece, we start by explaining the development of that field and the preconditions for writing the book when we did. We then identify three pedagogical challenges to teaching firearms law—the divisiveness of the topic, the heavily historical nature of the doctrine, and the fast-changing status of the law— and describe how we attempt to address each in the casebook.