Professor Joel Johnson, "Cert Alert: Supreme Court Cases of Interest" -- Fall 2024 ABA Criminal Justice Magazine

Professor Joel S. Johnson's latest installment of his quarterly column, "Cert Alert: Supreme Court Cases of Interest," has been published in the Fall 2024 edition of the ABA Criminal Justice Magazine. The column discusses cases on the Supreme Court's criminal docket.

From Supreme Court Cases of Interest:

Before leaving for the summer, the justices cleared their docket of the merits cases from the 2023 term. Below are summaries of the Supreme Court’s most significant criminal decisions of the term.

In United States v. Rahimi, the Court rejected by an 8-1 vote a facial Second Amendment challenge to 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which criminally prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders. This was the Court’s first Second Amendment case following its monumental 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the Court introduced a new text-history-and-tradition test for determining the constitutionality of firearms laws. Lower courts have struggled to apply that test, and Rahimi gave some additional guidance. The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts explained that the Bruen test was “not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” but instead to require courts to determine whether new laws regulating firearms are “relevantly similar to laws that our tradition is understood to permit, applying faithfully the balance struck by the founding generation to modern circumstances.” Justice Thomas—the author of Bruen—dissented, favoring a stricter conception of the Bruen test that would essentially require any modern law regulating firearms to have a historical analogue. In the end, although Rahimi puts a gloss on the Bruen test that appears slightly more accommodating to firearm-regulation efforts, it remains a bit murky how that new iteration of the test should be applied to other laws. In the coming years, more confusion among the lower courts is expected, requiring additional elaboration by the Court.

The complete article may be found at American Bar Association