The Supreme Court on Tuesday sent a challenge to a Pennsylvania law barring people 18- to 20-years-old from carrying guns back to the lower courts for another look in light of last term’s decision in United States v. Rahimi, in which the justices attempted to provide guidance for courts reviewing Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun rights. The announcement came on a list of orders from the justices’ private conference last week.
The justices did not add any new cases to their docket for the 2024-25 term.
In Paris v. Lara, Pennsylvania had appealed in a challenge to a state law that effectively bars 18- to 20-year-olds from openly carrying a gun when Pennsylvania has declared a state of emergency. In a decision issued in June 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit barred the state from enforcing the law, reasoning that the words “the people” in the Second Amendment “presumptively encompass all Americans, including 18-to-20-year-olds, and we are aware of no founding-era law that supports disarming people in that age group.”
Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Michelle Henry, told the justices that the Supreme Court’s June 2024 decision in Rahimi had “abrogated the Third Circuit’s analysis.” In Rahimi, the court upheld a federal law that bans anyone who is the subject of a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. In reaching that holding, Henry noted, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that even if the modern regulation being challenged “does not precisely match” laws restricting gun rights in early English or U.S. history, “it may still be analogous enough to pass constitutional muster.” Henry urged the justices to send the case back so that the 3rd Circuit could reconsider it in the wake of the court’s decision in Rahimi, and on Tuesday the justices did just that.
The justices on Tuesday also turned down a petition asking them to decide whether an indigent defendant who is represented by a public defender has the same constitutional right to continued representation by his initial court-appointed lawyer as a defendant who has retained his own lawyer.
The justices did not act on several petitions for review from the long list of petitions that accumulated over the summer, which they first met to discuss on Sept. 30. These petitions involve topics ranging from where challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s actions under the Clean Air Act should be filed to a challenge to the admissions program at three of Boston’s elite public high schools.
The justices will meet again for another private conference on Friday, Oct. 18.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
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