Hayley Lawrance is the Executive Director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.
On May 28–29, 2026, the Firearms Research Center at the University of Wyoming College of Law and the Duke Center for Firearms Law at Duke Law School co-hosted the Eighth Annual Firearms Law Works-in-Progress Conference at Duke Law School in Durham, NC.
The Firearms Law WIP Conference is the only legal works-in-progress event specifically focused on firearms law and policy, broadly understood to include history and other adjacent disciplines. Each year, it brings together scholars and practitioners working on new and developing projects at the intersection of firearms, constitutional law, history, public health, federalism, criminal law, torts, civil rights, and legal methodology. The conference is also a central part of the ongoing partnership between the Duke Center for Firearms Law and the University of Wyoming Firearms Research Center, with the two centers alternating hosting responsibilities each year.
This year’s conference continued that tradition. Over two days, participants discussed twenty works-in-progress in plenary and breakout sessions, with each session designed to provide authors with constructive feedback in a rigorous but collegial setting. The program reflected both the breadth of firearms law as a field and the increasing sophistication of scholarship responding to Heller, Bruen, Rahimi, and the rapidly changing legal and policy landscape surrounding firearms.
The conference began on Thursday afternoon with an opening by Professors Darrell Miller and George Mocsary discussing their two centers’ ongoing collaboration and their goals of advancing the field of firearms law and the collegiality that exista among scholars in the space, including those who have differing and even opposing views on the topic.
Next came a plenary session on The Second Amendment as a “Collective vs. Individual Right.” The panel examined foundational questions about the nature of the Second Amendment and the relationship between individual self-defense, collective defense, civic obligation, and constitutional membership. Paul Gowder’s project explored a Black collective self-defense tradition, from antebellum vigilance committees to the Deacons for Defense and Justice, as a source for conceptualizing the Second Amendment outside the individual-versus-militia dichomoty. Margaret Groban and Noah Heidorn explored the Second Amendment’s civic tradition and argued for restoring attention to the collective health and security of the body politic alongside individual armed self-preservation. Megan Walsh examined the role of self-defense in determining what “arms” the Second Amendment protects, asking how courts should translate the Supreme Court’s repeated insistence that self-defense is central to the right into a workable doctrine for modern weapons.
After the opening plenary, participants continued the conversation over a cocktail reception and dinner at the Washington Duke Inn.
Friday began with breakfast and a welcome session, “Thoughts on OT25,” hosted by Joseph Blocher, Dave Kopel, and Darrell Miller. The conversation framed the day’s discussions by situating firearms scholarship in a moment of continuing doctrinal movement at the Supreme Court and in the lower courts.
The first set of Friday breakout sessions turned to two major sets of questions: who is included within the Second Amendment’s protections, and how firearms law intersects with tort liability and PLCAA.
In “The ‘Who’ of the Second Amendment,” the papers explored how doctrine treats, includes, excludes, or endangers different categories of people. Michael Ulrich’s paper examined race, self-defense, and firearms rights, drawing lessons from reproductive justice to ask how power, privilege, racialized danger, and state enforcement shape the practical exercise of Second Amendment rights. Alex Rivenbark addressed the First and Second Amendment rights of minors, asking whether Justice Thomas’s perspective on minors’ First Amendment rights offers any insight into how the Court may address the constitutionality of laws restricting firearm possession by18-to-20-year-olds. Lahny Silva considered categorical disarmament of felons through the lens of the Second Amendment’s “dangerousness” dilemma, focusing especially on the Founding era history of felon disarmament and the absence of a clear mechanism for restoring federal firearms rights. Christopher Knoepke presented empirical work on Colorado Extreme Risk Protection Orders and subsequent criminal justice activity, examining whether granted ERPO petitions are associated with different post-petition arrest patterns than denied petitions.
The concurrent session, “Firearms, Torts & PLCAA,” focused on efforts to allocate responsibility for gun violence costs and to understand the constitutional and statutory limits on firearms-industry liability. Ryan Gerber proposed a “firearm superfund” framework modeled on climate superfund laws, under which firearms companies would fund gun-violence prevention initiatives and victim compensation. Leo Bernabei and David Kopel analyzed state “new wave” statutes designed to create firearms-specific nuisance or consumer-protection duties and considered whether those laws can function as predicate statutes under PLCAA. Solomon Park approached PLCAA from a different angle, applying originalist Commerce Clause reasoning to argue that the statute’s preclusion of certain state tort actions is difficult to reconcile with the original public meaning of “commerce” and with founding-era understandings of state authority over tort and nuisance law.
The “What” and “where” panels—what counts as a protected arm, and where the right to keep and bear arms operates—came next. In “The ‘What’ – Weapons & the Second Amendment,” presenters addressed weapons doctrine, common use, unusual weapons, and the regulation of firearm innovation. Robert Spitzer examined the history of laws regulating “unusual” weapons, including trap guns, punt, pivot, and swivel guns, ghost guns, and switchblades, and argued that historical restrictions often responded to weapons understood as threats to public safety and good order. Chip Welch analyzed the common use doctrine as applied to AR-15s and other commonly available semiautomatic rifles, including when such arms came into common use, which features they may constitutionally employ, and how public carry of such arms should be treated. David Kamper presented a takings-focused account of firearms innovation, arguing that when federal regulation destroys the economic value of valid firearms patents while leaving those patents formally intact, the Takings Clause and the Second Amendment interact in ways that require serious attention to compensation.
In the parallel “Where” session, presenters considered the places and jurisdictions in which the Second Amendment operates. Corey Yung explored the tension between a broad constitutional right to carry firearms in public and modern substantive self-defense law, arguing that current rules governing civilian and police use of deadly force can conflict with the right to bear arms recognized in Heller and Bruen. Eric Ruben presented an empirical analysis of gun-free zones before and after Bruen, building a fifty-state dataset of legislated place-based firearm restrictions and showing the complexity behind terms like “sensitive places” and “gun-free zones.” Dante Harootunian examined the status of the Second Amendment in the U.S. territories, focusing on the divergent treatment of the right in places such as Puerto Rico and American Samoa and the continuing importance of the Insular Cases and related territorial-rights doctrine.
After lunch, the conference concluded with a plenary session on “Bruen as a Methodology,” moderated by Dave Kopel. The session focused not on any single firearm restriction, but on the broader methodological questions now shaping Second Amendment adjudication and, increasingly, constitutional law more generally. Jake Charles proposed a more nuanced framework for history-and-tradition analysis, drawing on Justice Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence to suggest that courts should recognize not only historical approval and historical disapproval, but also a middle zone of historical silence. Luke Smith Morgan examined what he called “the other Bruen test”: the threshold question whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the claimant’s conduct before the court moves to history and tradition. Kevin Schascheck challenged recent calls for procedural “guardrails” around originalist historical fact-finding, arguing that such guardrails may impose asymmetric burdens, especially on litigants who must carry historical burdens in Second Amendment and other constitutional cases. Hayley Lawrence explored Bruen’s “desuetude problem,” asking what it means for courts to discount historical laws based on lack of enforcement evidence and whether that approach imports a form of desuetude into American constitutional analysis.
Taken together, the final plenary captured a central theme of the 2026 conference: firearms law is no longer only a specialized field about gun regulation. It has become a testing ground for major questions about constitutional method, historical evidence, judicial role, federalism, empirical legal analysis, civil rights, and the boundaries of regulatory authority.
Across all sessions, the 2026 WIP Conference reflected the vitality and intellectual range of firearms scholarship. The papers represented many perspectives and methodologies, and the discussions were marked by the same combination of seriousness, candor, and collegiality that has become the hallmark of the Firearms Law WIP. In a field where public debate can be especially polarized, the conference once again demonstrated the value of sustained academic engagement across differences of method, discipline, and viewpoint. We speak for both of our centers when we say that look forward to continuing this partnership and to supporting the development of thoughtful, rigorous, and constructive scholarship in firearms law and policy.