I’m delighted to report that Stephen Halbrook will be guest-blogging this week on Second Amendment law. Halbrook is both a prominent gun rights lawyer and a leading legal scholar: He argued Printz v. United States (the anti-commandeering case) in the Supreme Court, as well as Castillo v. United States and United States v. Thompson/Center Arms Co., and has filed briefs in a vast number of other cases, including the NRA’s party brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago and many amicus briefs in the Supreme Court and in other courts. On the scholarship side, his many articles and books have been cited in over 30 cases (including Heller and McDonald) and over 500 law review articles; his most recent book is America’s Rifle: The Case for the AR-15. He is part of a long tradition of lawyer-scholars outside the legal academy (as of course was Don Kates, another tremendously important exemplar in the same field), though that tradition has regrettably sharply waned in recent decades.
Halbrook is currently a Senior Fellow with the Independent Institute; he represented the National African American Gun Association as amicus curiae in Bruen, and has also recently filed briefs in Duncan v. Bonta (9th Cir.), Rupp v. Bonta (9th Cir.), State v. City of Weston (Fla. Ct. App. 2021), and many other cases. I very much look forward to his posts.