Wolford v. Lopez

Majority — Alito

Joined by: Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett

The majority held that Hawaii's law falls squarely within the Second Amendment's plain text — the permit holders are "the people," they seek to "bear" "arms," and the law restricts that bearing — making it presumptively unconstitutional. The Court then examined whether Hawaii could justify the law through historical analogues, and found it could not. The majority reasoned that the Second Amendment carries the same meaning in every state, so Hawaii's long local tradition of disfavoring firearms cannot shrink the scope of a national constitutional right. The historical laws Hawaii offered — mostly colonial-era anti-poaching statutes from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York — targeted unauthorized hunting on farmland and had nothing to do with the right of self-defense in everyday commercial settings like stores and restaurants; the gap between those laws and Hawaii's rule was too wide to support the analogy. The majority also rejected Hawaii's reliance on an 1865 Louisiana statute, finding it was part of that state's post-Civil War Black Codes designed to disarm Black people, making it both historically tainted and neither widespread nor widely accepted enough to carry any weight.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Jackson's dissent (joined by Justice Sotomayor) argued that this case is fundamentally about property law, not the Second Amendment, because no one has a constitutional right to enter private property — let alone while armed — without the owner's consent. The dissent contended that the form of that consent (implied vs. express) is a matter of state property law that the Second Amendment has never governed, and that Hawaii was simply exercising its traditional authority to set default property rules. The dissent also argued the majority misapplied the Bruen test at step one by stripping history out of the plain-text inquiry, effectively making any law that burdens carrying presumptively unconstitutional without requiring gun owners to show the conduct was actually protected at the founding. At step two, the dissent maintained that Hawaii's historical analogues — founding-era and Reconstruction-era laws requiring express consent before carrying firearms onto private property — were sufficiently similar in both "how" (a default rule requiring affirmative permission) and "why" (protecting property owners' rights and preventing harms from unauthorized armed entry) to uphold the law. Justice Kagan's separate dissent agreed with Justice Jackson's step-two analysis, concluding the historical analogues were close enough to sustain Hawaii's law without needing to resolve the step-one dispute or the use of the Louisiana Black Code.