During a recent U.S. Supreme Court oral argument session, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brought attention to what she considered a “flaw” in the high court’s recently devised historical analog test for laws limiting gun ownership. Jackson suggested that the application of the said test shows a skewed perspective of American gun regulation history.
The historical analog test has been a recent addition to the court’s jurisprudence arsenal. It involves gauging current laws based on a comparison with historically similar situations. The intention is to see if the laws stand up to the dynamics of past American society. Justice Jackson, however, implied that this test could be potentially skewed with a “whitewashed” interpretation of the nation’s gun regulation history.
For more details on Justice Jackson’s critique and the full proceedings of the oral arguments, you can read the original report on Law360.