A State Supreme Court Just Issued Another Devastating Rebuke of the U.S. Supreme Court

The Hawaii Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion on Wednesday declaring that its state constitution grants individuals absolutely no right to keep and bear arms outside the context of military service. Its decision rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, refusing to interpolate SCOTUS’ shoddy historical analysis into Hawaii law. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the ruling on this week’s Slate Plus segment of Amicus; their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. To listen to the full episode of Amicus, join Slate Plus. Dahlia Lithwick: Mark, I know you’re eager to talk about a kind of amazing and historic Hawaii Supreme Court decision on gun rights. It’s a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Todd Eddins that flames the logic of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions. And it cuts to the core of everything we’ve ever said on this show about originalism and judging. Walk us through the case?

Mark Joseph Stern: It’s an amazing case because the Hawaii Constitution has a provision that is the same as the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It literally uses the exact same words as the Second Amendment. And Justice Eddins said: Even though the provisions are the same, we will not interpret them the same way, because we think the U.S. Supreme Court clearly got it wrong in Heller when it said the Second Amendment creates an individual right to bear arms.

Justice Eddins then pored over the immense body of scholarship and historical research that has shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that SCOTUS was catastrophically wrong in Heller. He even quoted this great study that refutes a centerpiece of Justice Antonin Scalia’s analysis in Heller, which was the idea that the phrase “bear arms” typically meant individual use of a weapon in 18 th -century parlance. Scholars have analyzed thousands of documents from that era and proved that Scalia was just objectively wrong: The phrase “bear arms” was unfailingly used in a collective context, describing a militia—which makes sense, since the Second Amendment begins by saying its purpose is to protect the militia, not an individual right to own guns.