Cities, Preemption, and the Statutory Second Amendment

By Joseph Blocher

Although the Second Amendment tends to dominate the discussion about legal limits on gun regulation, nothing has done more to shape the state of urban gun law than state preemption laws, which fully or partially limit cities’ ability to regulate guns at the local level. The goals of this short Essay are to shed light on this “Statutory Second Amendment” and to provide a basic framework for evaluating it.

89 University of Chicago Law Review 557-580 (2022)