By Andrew Willinger and Eric Ruben

Legal scholarship is overly abstract and theoretical, making it unhelpful to judges and lawyers. That, at least, is the common critique from the bench. When it comes to the Second Amendment, however, a different pattern has emerged: judges consistently cite law review articles and look to the academy for guidance. Most recently, in United States v. Rahimi, some Justices went further, implicitly inviting more scholarly work to help the Court answer open questions raised by its novel methodological approach to the Second Amendment. This Article explores this aberrant trend.

We raise several explanations for the distinctive scholarly role in Second Amendment jurisprudence, including the Amendment's unique aspects as well as the role of legal movements in facilitating the Amendment's development. Faced with a lack of judicial precedent on both the right to keep and bear arms and originalism-in-practice, law review articles often can be more helpful than past opinions. Beyond scholarship's utility in a new area of law, we suggest that a related phenomenon-the gun rights and conservative legal movements' trifold success at facilitating the rise of the individual Second Amendment right, popularizing originalism as a methodology, and elevating originalist judges to the bench-is an important part of the story. For a half century, organizations focused on achieving both a robust right to bear arms and a conservative vision of the Constitution have become more prominent and have closely associated with both scholars and judges. If, in the usual telling, judges look askance at scholarship, this specific area of law might present an exception since it has been a joint project from the beginning.

The Article concludes that the judge-scholar collaboration that has characterized Second Amendment case law is likely to continue. Moreover, it could have ramifications far beyond the right to keep and bear arms, including for other rights that may be on the cusp of transformation and for other legal movements seeking to emulate the strategies that ushered in modern Second Amendment law.

78 SMU Law Review __ (forthcoming), Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2025-26, SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 696,