Announcing the Winners of the Second Annual Everytown Law Fund Law Student Writing Competition!

The Everytown Law Fund is pleased to announce the three winners of its second annual law school student writing competition! The competition asked law students to submit original research and writing on how to advance gun violence prevention and gun safety through litigation in the civil and criminal justice systems. Here are the 2024 winners:

Winner Graham Ambrose (Stanford Law School) penned Gunmaking at the Founding, which recounts the history of gunmaking practices and regulations at the Nation’s Founding. It presents new evidence that early Americans regulated gunmaking and did not understand the Second Amendment as protecting gunmaking; in light of this history, Bruen should permit reasonable modern regulations. The Note also makes two important methodological arguments. First, non-statutory sources of law should play a role in illuminating original constitutional meaning. Second, after United States v. Rahimi, modern regulations may be upheld by legal principles that emerge from disparate bodies of law. Graham’s Note is slated to be published in the Stanford Law Review next year. 

Co-runner-up Olivia Baccellieri (Brooklyn Law School) wrote New York’s Red-Flag Gun Law is at Half-Mast: How District Attorneys Should Rise to the Occasion with Extreme Risk Protection Orders, which provides a thoughtful accounting of the development of New York’s extreme risk protection order (“ERPO”) statute, from its first inception in 2019 to its expansion in 2022 after the racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that claimed ten innocent lives. The Note analyzes recent cases involving the 2022 ERPO statute and outlines the statute’s potential to stem gun violence in New York. Finally, the Note provides unique insights into district attorneys’ implementation of the 2022 ERPO statute and offers suggestions for the statute’s further utilization. Specifically, this Note calls on district attorneys’ offices to designate specific staff to file ERPO petitions, to collaborate with police and judges, and to conduct outreach to other categories of ERPO petitioners.

Co-runner-up Emma Kilroy (Duke Law School) authored ‘We’re Not Selling Ice Cream Here’: PLCAA, the Predicate Exception, and Providing Relief for Plaintiffs, which focuses on the critical “predicate exception” to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). PLCAA is a federal law passed in 2005 that hampers plaintiffs’ ability to bring suit against certain firearm industry members, with limited exceptions. This Note surveys all cases that involve the predicate exception to PLCAA as of its writing and identifies trends in the courts’ reasoning, categorizing each case by predicate statute and outcome in an Appendix. The Note then analyzes seven recently enacted state industry accountability laws that are clearly “applicable to the sale or marketing of” firearms and related products, comparing their provisions, predicting challenges to these laws, and offering recommendations for future legislation. Emma’s piece has been published in the Duke Law Journal.

For more information about the writing competition, please visit our competition webpage. Details regarding the 2025 writing competition will be available next year!