Law Schools Must Prep Students To Tackle Gun Violence
Law Schools aren't doing their part to tackle gun violence
Below I’m resharing a piece I wrote during my Litigation Fellowship with Everytown for Gun Safety at the end of last year.
[Originally published on Law360.com, December 20, 2022]
Earlier this month, the suspect in the mass shooting that occurred at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colo., just before the Thanksgiving holiday was charged with 305 counts, including murder and hate crimes.[1] In 2022, America has averaged more than one mass shooting per day[2] and gun violence remains one of the country's defining crises.
Upon graduating from Harvard Law School this past May, I joined the litigation team at Everytown for Gun Safety because I believe the law is an essential tool in the movement to end gun violence in the U.S. While I'm thankful for all I learned and experienced in law school, I can't help but feel at a disadvantage compared to my peers working in other legal spaces.
Despite the reality that gun violence is a major issue, law schools across the country have invested relatively little in exposing law students to the important and fast-growing space of gun violence prevention litigation. Given that Gen Z — the so-called mass shooting generation — is now of law school age, there is greater impetus to fill this institutional void.
Law schools play an essential role in developing talent pipelines. They directly influence the supply of lawyers in the country — selecting who they are and shaping what they'll do. The courses, clinics, clubs and career opportunities offered to students have direct consequences on what the real world legal space looks like.
There are over 40,000 gun violence deaths in the country each year.[3] With less than 25 attorneys, our team at Everytown Law is the largest team of gun violence prevention litigators[4] in the country.
Our team represents survivors, victims and their families, sues to hold the gun industry accountable, partners with cities to defend smart gun policy, and has for many years filed amicus briefs aimed at shaping Second Amendment law — including most recently in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's June decision[5] in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that has opened the floodgates to new challenges to gun safety laws.
Simply put, there is an endless amount of gun violence prevention legal work to be done — but a relatively finite group of lawyers dedicated to such efforts. The lack of resources dedicated to gun policy and law at law schools makes this issue less likely to be remedied in the future.
An immediate effect of this reality is that as I begin my career in the gun violence space, my classmates working in similarly important spaces like immigration law or criminal justice reform are far ahead. They have already taken classes or worked on cases dedicated to their field of practice.
While not every worthwhile area of law lends itself to pedagogy, gun law is a particularly appropriate means to educate students on the law more broadly. In fact, gun violence litigation cuts across many aspects of the required first-year curriculum at law schools — constitutional law, civil procedure, criminal law and torts, to name a few.
Eighty-eight percent of students[6] in my law school class took part in a clinic during their time in school. As the legal community has long-understood, these clinics offer invaluable experience to inchoate legal minds. There isn't a single legal clinic dedicated to gun violence prevention in the country. This is a massive missed opportunity, not only for students who could gain insight into the important work of gun industry accountability and trauma- informed lawyering, but also for the legal field more broadly.
In the often-underfunded impact litigation space, law school clinics function as de facto research labs where new and creative legal theories can be developed and tested. As states across the country pass laws aimed at increasing pathways toward gun industry accountability[7] and curbing gun violence, this sort of experimentation is exactly what is needed.
Similarly, as a student, I was able to take courses on incredibly niche subjects like wildlife law, but not gun violence prevention. A limited number of schools offer courses on firearms law or the Second Amendment, but these tend to be one-off academic experiences. With a few notable exceptions, top law schools have been slow to dedicate substantial resources to the study of firearms law.
Investing in the gun violence prevention space is not only the right thing for law schools to do — it's good business. The average law student is in their early twenties. Gun violence is a top policy issue for this Gen Z demographic. Moreover, these students live in constant fear of gun violence.[8]
As students like David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor and gun safety activist who finishes college this year, have made clear,[9] this is an issue Gen Z plans to drive change on. Law schools would be wise to adapt and compete, by empowering these students with the legal foundations and experiences needed to accomplish this goal.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/us/club-q-shooting-suspect-charges/index.html.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/02/mass-shootings-in-2022/.
[3] https://www.bradyunited.org/key-statistics.
[4] https://everytownlaw.org.
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/23/politics/second-amendment-gun-rights-supreme- court-new-york-test/index.html.
[6] https://hls.harvard.edu/clinics/in-house-clinics/.
[7] https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2022/09/public-nuisance-claims- targeting-gun-cos.
[8] https://www.thetrace.org/2022/09/youth-study-mass-shooting-mental-health/. [9] https://time.com/6186538/david-hogg-guns-march-for-our-lives/.
[9] https://time.com/6186538/david-hogg-guns-march-for-our-lives/.