Supreme Court bars 'vampire rules' on gun ownership
Center
In a 6-3 ideologically divided decision, the high court said that requiring permission in advance is an undue burden on the right to possess and carry a firearm.
The law banned people from carrying guns in most public spaces and private property without owner’s permissionUS politics live – latest updatesSign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inboxThe US supreme court struck down a restrictive gun law in the state of Hawaii that bans people from carrying guns in certain public spaces and on private property without the permission of the property’s owner.The decision was made in a 6-3 vote, with Justice Samuel Alito offering the majority opinion – backed by the other members of the court’s rightwing supermajority – and Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the dissent. Continue reading...
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled four years ago in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that the Second and 14th Amendments protect Americans' right to carry handguns outside of their homes for self-defense. Hawaii Democrats came up with an apparent workaround to curb gun rights in their state, passing a law in 2023 that banned the carrying of guns onto private property without verbal or written consent of the property owner. Those who ran afoul of this law faced up to a year in prison.'Hawaii's law does not restrict the right to carry a gun at all,' Jackson wrote.This didn't sit well with a trio of Maui County residents with concealed-carry permits who, with the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, sued on the basis of the understanding articulated again by Solicitor General D. John Sauer last year: "Because most property owners do not post signs either allowing or forbidding guns, Hawaii’s default rule functions as a near-complete ban on public carry."To the great chagrin of liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court determined in a 6-3 ruling on Thursday that Hawaii's so-called "vampire law" is unconstitutional.The court, which reversed a 2024 decision from the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Appeals Court, noted that law-abiding permit-holders "not only must ... take care to avoid all the territory where the possession of a gun is prohibited outright, but they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, restaurants, and stores."While recognizing the right of establishments that are open to the public "to admit or exclude persons who are carrying guns for self-defense under either the common-law rule or Hawaii’s law," the court noted that the so-called vampire law "flips the default rule at common law, under which anyone has an implied license to enter property held open to the public unless the property owner withdraws consent."Justice Samuel Alito noted in the opinion that the "regime" established in Hawaii "hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives."RELATED: ‘Shall not be infringed’ — even if you're high, Supreme Court rules Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post/Getty ImagesJackson was once again of a different mind than her conservative colleagues on the meaning of the "right to bear arms."At the outset of her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson framed — in Orwellian fashion — Hawaii's infringement on Americans' constitutional rights as an effort to "protect the rights of its residents — both those who wish to carry guns and those who prefer that guns are not carried on their private property without their express permission."Jackson —who repeatedly stressed that she still disagrees with the decision in Bruen, calling it a "grave mistake" — claimed that "the court's objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law."According to Jackson, the vampire law that effectively requires law-abiding citizens to everywhere obtain consent before exercising their Second Amendment right not only "does not implicate the Second Amendment" — "Hawaii's law does not restrict the right to carry a gun at all."The liberal justice apparently assigns state law and custom greater weight than federal law on the matter of guns, stressing that "recognizing state autonomy in this respect is especially appropriate here, since Hawaii has never had a custom of armed carry."Jackson concluded her 32-page dissent with yet another attack on her colleagues, writing, "While purporting to constrain judges, the majority has unmasked the discretionary choices that lie beneath the court’s decisions regarding which analogues are 'vastly different' ... and whose historical experiences are worthy of inclusion."Justice Elena Kagan wrote a separate dissenting opinion.This ruling will reportedly impact a handful of blue states, including New York, Maryland, and California, which took a similar approach to Hawaii.John Commerford, executive director of the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action, said of the outcome, "Law-abiding gun owners will no longer be forced to beg for special permission simply to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms in public places."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
The Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun restriction that limits when people can carry firearms on certain private properties, known as the “vampire rule.”
The Supreme Court decided two cases on Tuesday that, at least at first glance, have nothing to do with one another. One involves the People’s Republic of China, Silicon Valley, and the Judiciary Act of 1789. The other involves Louisiana prisons, Rastafarian spiritual beliefs, and contract law. In both cases, however, are two shared and recurring impulses from the court’s conservative majority: a nearly boundless contempt for Congress as an institution.The first case, Cisco Systems v. Doe, involves a group of plaintiffs who claim that the Chinese government has persecuted them for their religious beliefs. They filed lawsuits against Cisco, a major U.S. tech company, alleging that the company sold surveillance software to the Chinese government that was later used to surveil, torture, and otherwise abuse them.In theory, no federal law is any more “constitutional” than another. But laws from the First Congress tend to be seen as indicative of how the Constitution’s Framers intended the government to function. Among the early laws they passed was the Alien Tort Statute, or ATS, which allows federal courts to hear “any civil action” against a foreign national for any “tort” that was “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”Congress enacted the ATS as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789—the first federal law it enacted to structure the federal courts. Though it was only occasionally invoked in those courts until the 1980s, one might think that its founding-era pedigree might entitle it to a little more respect. Apparently not. The modern-day aversion to this long-standing law was on display in the 2004 case Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a complex case about whether a man arrested by federal agents on drug charges could sue a Mexican national for temporarily apprehending him.In his majority opinion, Justice David Souter wrote that the ATS “was originally understood to be available to enforce a small number of international norms that a federal court could properly recognize as within the common law enforceable without further statutory authority.” Those norms included “offenses against ambassadors, violation of safe conducts, and piracy.” Accordingly, he rejected Sosa’s more novel claim against Alvarez-Machain.Does this mean that only that “small number” of claims described by Souter could be pursued under the ATS? Souter said no. He left open the possibility that the high court might recognize future implied claims beyond the more traditional ones. Justice Antonin Scalia took the opposite approach. He wrote in a partially dissenting opinion that he disagreed with the majority’s “reservation of a discretionary power in the federal judiciary to create causes of action for the enforcement of international-law-based norms.”Scalia argued that this approach would “amount to judicial lawmaking” that the federal courts are “neither authorized nor suited to perform.” Souter, on the other hand, took a more deferential approach to the framework that Congress had created in the ATS. He noted that Congress could correct the court’s work through its own legislative powers by amending the ATS itself or adding new constraints to it through separate legislation.“While we agree with Justice Scalia to the point that we would welcome any congressional guidance in exercising jurisdiction with such obvious potential to affect foreign relations, nothing Congress has done is a reason for us to shut the door to the law of nations entirely,” Souter explained. “It is enough to say that Congress may do that at any time (explicitly, or implicitly by treaties or statutes that occupy the field) just as it may modify or cancel any judicial decision so far as it rests on recognizing an international norm as such.”The court’s conservative majority was never satisfied with that ruling. In case after case over the past 20 years, the justices repeatedly narrowed the scope of ATS claims, including by ruling that it could not be used to sue foreign corporations and by holding that domestic corporations can’t be sued for “general corporate activity” linked to human rights abuses. In Cisco, Justice Amy Coney Barrett finally transformed Scalia’s dissent in Sosa into the court’s new majority opinion.“Since Sosa was decided, we have firmly committed to the view that judicially created causes of action offend the separation of powers in almost every circumstance,” Barrett wrote. “As a result, we have virtually eliminated the practice of fashioning them.” She finished the job by “clos[ing] the door that Sosa cracked to judicially created ATS liability.” The Supreme Court’s rulings on these matters are often described as “closing the courthouse door” on wronged plaintiffs, but rarely by the majority itself.Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent, chastised the majority for its transparent about-face.
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