Left: U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas answers questions during a visit to the University of Texas at Austin, in Austin, Texas, Wednesday, April 15, 2026 (AP Photo/Eric Gay). Right: In this Oct. 26, 2020, file photo Amy Coney Barrett listens as President Donald Trump speaks before Justice Thomas administers the Constitutional Oath to Barrett on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington after she was confirmed by the Senate earlier in the evening (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File).
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once again accused the Supreme Court's conservative majority of making up its gun jurisprudence as it goes along, Justice Amy Coney Barrett sharply answered that Hawaii's partial reliance on "19th-century laws […] mostly designed to suppress newly freed blacks" showed just why the state's public-carry ban had to fail.
Last week, Justice Neil Gorsuch led a majority in striking down the federal government's attempted prosecution of a cannabis user who also owns a gun, building off the high court's Second Amendment decisions in three recent landmark rulings to reach that result. In one of those cases, the 2022 case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas ruled New York's "licensing regime" unconstitutionally infringed on the Second Amendment rights of "ordinary, law-abiding citizens […] to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense." The majority analyzed whether the law "comported with history and tradition" of other such restrictions and concluded that it did not.
Similarly, Justice Samuel Alito wrote and the majority held on Friday in the case of Wolford v. Lopez that Hawaii's law prohibiting "licensed concealed-carry permit holders from carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the property owner's express authorization" is doubly unconstitutional.
"For years, the State of Hawaii made it almost impossible to obtain a license to carry a firearm. Four years ago, however, this Court held in [Bruen], that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right to carry handguns outside the home for self-defense. Hawaii responded by replacing its old law on carry permits with new laws that achieved a similar result. On a large portion of the land within the State's boundaries, possession of a firearm is now flatly prohibited. And the law now before us severely burdens the ability to carry a firearm in much of the rest of the State by prohibiting firearms on private property without the express and affirmative consent of the property owner," Alito said. "This law departs sharply from the standard common-law rule on access to private property held open to the public. Under that rule, everyone, including those lawfully carrying firearms, may enter unless expressly prohibited from doing so. By contrast, under the new Hawaii law, no one carrying a firearm may enter without the property owner's express authorization."
The "regime," the conservative justice added, "hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives," whether at a store, laundromat, barbershop, gas station, or restaurant.
"We hold that the law is unconstitutional," Alito said.
Barrett filed a concurrence, which Thomas and Gorsuch specifically embraced as to her "Part II–B." In that section, the former law professor tore into the state's arguments.
"These laws get Hawaii nowhere," she began, noting the state "does not dispute that most of the 19th-century laws were understood not to address the carry of guns in general but to curtail the freedom of blacks in particular."
"It is beyond me why Hawaii would claim that these vile laws can justify its present-day restriction. We can put aside the question whether they are legitimate evidence of the Second Amendment's scope," Barrett said, nodding to Jackson's dissent, "because regardless, they do not help Hawaii."
Barrett did not stop there.
"The State seems to think Bruen is a matching game: Southern States enacted broad default rules, Hawaii reasons, so it can do the same today. But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why. The Black Codes were enacted to subordinate newly freed slaves. Hawaii obviously does not contend that its law promotes an analogous interest," she said. "So its law and the default rules in the Black Codes are not 'relevantly similar.'"
"Most would take that as a compliment," Barrett added in a parting shot.
Jackson, with the support of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, answered that the conservative justices proved again that Bruen is "unworkable" and a "grave" error.
"To hear the majority tell it, Hawaii's law is a blatant attempt to end-run our Second Amendment precedents. But the statute at issue does no such thing. Instead, it fairly applies a first principle of property law—the right to exclude—and does no harm to the Second Amendment," Jackson stated, calling Hawaii's an "exercise of state regulatory power that has historically sounded in property law, not the Second Amendment."
"In my view, our adoption of the Bruen test was a grave mistake. But to the extent the Court has embraced this test, surely it cannot shirk responsibility for adhering to Bruen's tenets, whatever the result. Today, the majority fails to faithfully apply its own jurisprudence," Jackson concluded. "It alters the Bruen test and overrides Hawaii's considered—and in my view, constitutionally sound—judgment that the property interests of its residents should be protected against unauthorized armed entry."