I have filed an amicus curiae brief in Wolford v. Lopez, which is pending in the Supreme Court, on behalf of the National African American Gun Association. As explained in my previous post, the issue is whether the Ninth Circuit erred in holding that Hawaii may prohibit the carrying of handguns by permit holders on private property open to the public unless the property owner affirmatively gives express permission.
Hawaii enacted this ban in defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in public. The Ninth Circuit upheld the ban under Bruen based on the existence of two purported historical analogues, one of which was an 1865 Louisiana law. I've written extensively on the black codes in Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the "Constitutional Right to Bear Arms," which both Heller and McDonald cite as authority. Thus, I focused on the Louisiana law in the amicus brief. The following summarizes the argument.
Hawaii's ban on a licensee carrying a firearm on another's property that is open to the public without express authorization is covered within the plain text of the Second Amendment and is presumptively protected. To demonstrate that the restriction is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation," New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 17 (2022), the Ninth Circuit relies on two supposed analogues, a 1771 New Jersey law made it an offense to carry a gun on another's lands without a license or written permission, and an 1865 Louisiana law prohibiting the carrying of firearms on the premises or plantation of another without consent.
