Announcing the Winners of the Third Annual Everytown Law Law Student Writing Competition!

Everytown Law is pleased to announce the two winners of its third 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 2025 winners:

Winner Kevin Wang penned Bruen, Levels of Generality, and Our Historical Tradition of the Regulatory “Why”, which seeks to resolve an ambiguity within the second step of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen’s two-step test for assessing the constitutionality of gun safety laws. Kevin argues that at its second step, Bruen requires that a gun law aligns with our nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, meaning that it is sufficiently analogous to historical regulations along two metrics: “how” and “why” the regulation burdens the right to keep and bear arms. The Note discusses how Bruen did not decide the level of generality that courts should use when framing a regulation’s “how” and “why,” an ambiguity that ends up being an issue of major consequence. Kevin’s scholarship argues that because our history displays a tradition of employing high levels of generality for regulatory justifications—the “why”—today’s courts should do the same. His article is forthcoming in the UC Law Constitutional Quarterly.

Runner-up Haley Platt authored Cracking Laws Trapped in Amber: The Case for Firearm Removal Laws to Protect Against Credible Threats, which advocates for legislative action in conjunction with incentivization measures for states to enact meaningful firearm relinquishment and removal laws upon a judicial determination that an individual is a credible threat to the safety of others. Haley’s proposed law aims to strike a balance between an individual’s Second Amendment right and the need to ensure safety for victims and the public—mirroring the constitutionality outlined in the Supreme Court majority’s analysis of historical surety laws in United States v. Rahimi. Her article has been published in the Temple Law Review.

Congratulations to our winners, and for more information about the writing competition, please visit our competition webpage.