As co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, Joseph Blocher regularly considers arcane questions related to the Second Amendment:
“Is a modern AR-15-style rifle relevantly similar to a colonial musket? In what ways? Is a gun prohibition on the subway or in Times Square relevantly similar to medieval laws prohibiting weapons at fairs and markets? How?” Blocher wrote, for example, in the New York Times.
Those questions in particular arose from a 2022 Supreme Court decision requiring all modern gun laws to be consistent with historical tradition.
The ruling brought wide attention to Blocher’s research, which broadly covers the law and history of gun rights and regulation. The Lanty L. Smith ’67 Distinguished Professor of Law, Blocher is also an expert on state and federal constitutional law, the First and Second Amendments, legal history, and property.
In some recent work, he has called attention to the ways that guns can not only cause physical harm, but also chill social and political participation and thus “distort the body politic.”
“When people carry guns it impacts other people’s constitutional rights,” he explained, saying that the government has an interest in preserving our social life by regulating guns.
Blocher grew up in Durham, and teaches a class on how law has shaped the city’s historical development. He joined Duke’s law faculty in 2009 and received the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012.
Testifying on Capitol Hill last fall, before Blocher said that the Second Amendment permits the kind of reasonable gun regulation that is favored by a vast majority of Americans, but that the Supreme Court’s historical test raises hard questions for judges and scholars.
“Quite simply, it is hard to draw meaningful connections between modern laws and their historic predecessors, given the enormous changes in both weapons technology and society more broadly,” he said.
