Professor J. Joel Alicea, Director of the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Catholic Law, recently joined Professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld on their podcast rationally BASED to discuss Viramontes v. Cook County, a Second and Fourteenth Amendment case the Supreme Court will hear this term. As a member of the litigation team on the case, Alicea helped examine a significant question of law and public policy: do Americans have a constitutional right to possess AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles.
The conversation covered the development of Second Amendment doctrine from District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 to the present, including the scope of the right to keep and bear arms’ exception for “dangerous and unusual weapons” and whether that exception applies to AR-15s. The discussion also touched on broader questions about judicial power, the “tiers of scrutiny” framework, and the use of the term “assault weapons.”
