Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. This week’s Supreme Court hearings can be summed up with the title of Warren Zevon’s classic tune “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” The court heard arguments about a Hawaii gun law and President Donald Trump’s bid to fire a Federal Reserve member. The Trump administration wants the gun law gone. The hearings suggested its view might prevail in the Second Amendment case but not in the Fed case.
The gun case featured an unusual dynamic, with the court’s Republican appointees harping on the racist nature of an 1865 Louisiana law. They did so because the court’s recent Second Amendment precedent says that gun laws can’t stand unless they’re consistent with the nation’s historical tradition, and Hawaii invoked the old law to defend its modern measure.
Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch said the old law was “part of an effort, it appears, to disarm Black people,” and fellow GOP appointee Samuel Alito said it wanted to put Black people “at the mercy of racist law enforcement officers.” Alito wondered why it wasn’t “the height of irony to cite a law that was enacted for exactly the purpose of preventing someone from exercising the Second Amendment right, to cite this as an example of what the Second Amendment protects.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested the problem was with the court’s new precedent itself, namely the historical tradition test laid out in the 2022 case, called Bruen. “I guess I’m wondering whether that doesn’t signal a problem with the Bruen test, that to the extent that we have a test that relates to historical regulation, but all of the history of regulation is not taken into account, I think there might be something wrong with the test,” the Biden appointee said at Tuesday’s hearing in Wolford v. Lopez.
Although the court seemed to walk back the Bruen precedent in a 2024 case, which allowed gun restrictions for domestic violence perpetrators, the Hawaii law looks like it might be on the way out. The challengers to the law told the justices that California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York have bans similar to Hawaii’s, which bars carrying concealed guns onto private property that’s open to the public without the property owner’s permission.
The Federal Reserve case, however, might not go Trump’s way. Heading into Wednesday’s hearing in Trump v. Cook, there were already signs that the court was inclined to protect the central bank’s independence to a greater extent than it had been protecting other federal agencies. The hearing reinforced that notion, leaving the impression that the court will keep Lisa Cook on the Fed’s Board of Governors, from which the president wants to remove her from a seat that expires in 2038. Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh said the administration’s position “would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.”
The justices aren’t scheduled to be back on the bench until late February, so we might not have the ruling on tariffs or any other cases argued this term until then, at least. But we’ll be watching the shadow docket in the meantime, including a pending emergency appeal to block California’s Democratic-friendly congressional map ahead of the midterms.
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