Noah Feldman, Columnist

Only Clarence Thomas Is Willing to Give a Gun to a Domestic Abuser

The 8-1 ruling should make clear that not all the conservative justices are on board with the new “history and tradition” way of deciding cases.

June 21, 2024 at 4:15 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Photographer: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

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Gun rights are not unlimited according to an 8-1 Supreme Court decision that draws back from the extreme Second Amendment decision the court made two years ago in the notorious Bruen case. The holding in the new case, United States v. Rahimi, is that the government may bar people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns.

But the real significance of the case lies in the way the court’s conservatives splintered over the “history and tradition” approach that Justice Clarence Thomas used in Bruen. In that case, he wrote the opinion. In this one, Thomas found himself the lone dissenter.