Professor Joel Johnson Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Case Harris v. United States

Professor Joel S. Johnson has submitted a cert-stage amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Erik Harris v. United States, a pending Supreme Court cases involving the constitutionality of a federal criminal prohibition on firearm possession by "unlawful users" of narcotics. The case is one of several pending petitions involving constitutional challenges to the law.

In the brief, Professor Johnson argues that the Court should grant cert in Harris because it is the only petition that asks the Court to consider a void-for-vagueness challenge to Section 922(g)(3) in addition to the Second Amendment challenge.  The presence of the vagueness challenge is significant, Professor Johnson argues, because vagueness considerations will likely play a central role in how the Court construes the statute in the first instance. The Court has never before construed Section 922(g)(3). A sufficiently narrow construction of the statute to avoid vagueness concerns could make resolution of the Second Amendment issue relatively straightforward.

The brief draws from Professor Johnson's article Vagueness Avoidance, 110 Va. L. Rev. 71 (2024) (SSRN).

The full brief can be read at Erik Harris v. United States