{"id":413,"date":"2026-07-21T14:08:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=413"},"modified":"2026-07-21T14:08:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:08:50","slug":"the-history-the-court-would-rather-not-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=413","title":{"rendered":"The history the court would rather not see"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In 2021\u2019s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen<\/em>, the Supreme Court held that modern gun laws must be \u201cconsistent with the Nation\u2019s historical tradition of firearm regulation\u201d to survive a Second Amendment challenge. Under that newly announced history-and-tradition test, defenders of gun laws must point to historical analogs that similarly regulated firearms to pass constitutional muster.<\/p>\n

Read more Heller and Bruen are here to stay<\/a><\/p>\n

From the start, Bruen<\/em>\u2019s methodology raised many questions. How analogous to a historical law must a current law be? How many analogs must a law have to be consistent with the \u201chistorical tradition\u201d? What historical periods are relevant when searching for analogs? I could go on. And as lower courts and commentators endeavored to make sense of Bruen<\/em>, they repeatedly expressed frustration with the seemingly endless indeterminacy of the history-and-tradition test.<\/p>\n

This term\u2019s case of Wolford v. Lopez<\/em> was supposed to clear up some of the confusion. Wolford<\/em> concerned a Hawaii law that required licensed gun carriers to obtain a property owner\u2019s permission before bringing a firearm onto private property open to the public. California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey have similar laws. With Justice Samuel Alito writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, the court struck down the Hawaii law, holding that the law \u201cunquestionably imposed a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right\u201d to bear arms.<\/p>\n

In reaching this decision and by purporting to elucidate Bruen<\/em>\u2019s history-and-tradition test, Wolford <\/em>highlighted yet another question that the court\u2019s history-and-tradition methodology has never adequately answered: What should a court do when the relevant history is morally abhorrent? Reading Wolford<\/em> suggests the court has no clear answer.<\/p>\n

To defend its law, Hawaii relied on an 1865 Louisiana statute making it unlawful \u201cto carry fire-arms on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor.\u201d As historical analogs go, the Louisiana law was a \u201cdead ringer.\u201d But, despite being race-neutral on its face, the statute was a Black Code, enacted as part of a broader legal regime designed to disarm formerly enslaved Black people and preserve white supremacy in the wake of emancipation.<\/p>\n

Alito dismissed the relevance of the statute outright, calling it a \u201ctainted artifact\u201d whose invocation \u201ccannot be taken seriously.\u201d Justice Amy Coney Barrett\u2019s concurrence was even sharper, chastising Hawaii for citing a law \u201cdesigned to suppress newly freed blacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one disputes that the Black Codes deserve moral condemnation. Hawaii itself that the \u201cBlack Codes are undoubtedly a relic of a shameful portion of American history.\u201d But as Hawaii continued, that does not necessarily \u201cmean that the laws contained within them are irrelevant to the Second Amendment\u2019s historical analysis.\u201d Put another way, moral condemnation is not a substitute for rigorous legal reasoning.<\/p>\n

Read more The ripple effects of the TPS ruling<\/a><\/p>\n

As leading Second Amendment scholar Professor Jake Charles argued in his essay Sordid Sources, a constitutional methodology built on history must have some account of how courts should treat historical laws rooted in racism or other forms of oppression. A court simply declaring that the law is too tainted to matter and move on is hardly principled reasoning. As Charles explains, it is problematic for courts \u201cto artificially excise what are indisputable traditions of historical gun regulations because they, like so much of American history, are grounded in bigotry.\u201d Such an approach, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor) charged in her dissent, allows \u201cthe court to cavalierly pick and choose which parts of the historical record count.\u201d<\/p>\n

If history is supposed to constrain judges, the court should have explained why some history counts and why some does not. The Wolford<\/em> majority offers no coherent account on this front. Indeed, the court relied on the same Reconstruction period to reinforce its understanding of the Second Amendment and its application against the states, explaining that the framers of the 14th Amendment understood that \u201cthe right to keep and bear arms was critically important for vulnerable blacks during this period.\u201d And this was not a new move. Throughout its modern Second Amendment jurisprudence, the court has the racist history of disarming Black people to justify its expansive view of the Second Amendment\u2019s scope.<\/p>\n

Now, one might think there is a difference between citing racist laws as evidence that a right existed (laws intended to disarm Black people are proof of a right that was wrongly denied), versus citing racist laws as evidence of how rights can be constricted (laws intended to disarm Black people are proof of permissible regulation that were impermissibly implemented). But the majority in Wolford <\/em>did not draw that distinction or articulate how such a distinction fits into its broader historical methodology. For her part, Barrett explained that Louisiana\u2019s law was not analogous because of why <\/em>it was enacted (to subordinate Black people), but nobody else joined her concurrence. We are therefore left to wonder what work a history of racism does in the Bruen <\/em>history-and-tradition test. If it simply turns on a justice\u2019s moral perception of what counts as \u201ctoo tainted,\u201d then the court\u2019s use of history is not much of a principled constraint at all.<\/p>\n

Jackson put her finger on this problem. A court committed to historical analogizing cannot simply declare portions of the historical record off limits. It must explain why they no longer bear on constitutional meaning. The court rejected the Louisiana statute not because it discriminated on its face, but because of the historical context in which it was enacted, without providing a satisfactory answer for why that context renders the analog irrelevant as a matter of constitutional analysis.<\/p>\n

The problem with this type of historical editing is not merely methodological, any more than the Black Codes are simply laws from the past. Black Codes are evidence of why the 14th Amendment was necessary in the first place. They exposed the limits of formal emancipation, demonstrating how states could use facially neutral laws to thwart racial equality. In turn, these laws and the context from which they arose helped produce the constitutional transformation of Reconstruction and are important to understanding the scope of the Reconstruction Amendments. They are not an embarrassing footnote to constitutional history. They are one of its defining chapters. And if the court wants to continue with this historical mode of constitutional interpretation, it must confront how the more unsavory moments of our history shape our understanding of the Constitution, especially when those moments are chock-full of constitutional meaning.<\/p>\n

To treat those laws as too morally contaminated to engage is not simply to leave a gap in the court’s historical analysis. It diminishes Black Americans\u2019 place in our constitutional history by erasing the legal harms that Black people have faced, the effects of which reverberate through today. Across the country, public institutions have softened or removed references to slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination as if they were not a part of the American tradition. There is a growing impulse to sanitize the ugliest chapters of American history. Wolford<\/em> seems to reflect a similar instinct.<\/p>\n

Read more Supreme Court agrees to hear case on whether airplane was improperly seized for transporting a six-pack of beer<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2021\u2019s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court held that modern gun laws must be \u201cconsistent with the Nation\u2019s historical tradition of firearm regulation\u201d to survive a Second Amendment challenge. Under that newly announced history-and-tradition test, defenders of gun laws must point to historical analogs that similarly regulated firearms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civil-rights-and-wrongs","category-commentary"],"yoast_head":"\nThe history the court would rather not see - American Service Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=413\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The history the court would rather not see - American Service Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In 2021\u2019s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. 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