Today I learned of the "Bruen test" in Clarence Thomas' Majority opinion for Bruen and how it was revisited in United States v. Rahimi.
From Amy Howe's June 21, 2024 Opinion analysis: Supreme Court upholds bar on guns under domestic-violence restraining orders
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson echoed Sotomayor’s disdain for Bruen, noting that she too would have joined the dissent if she had been on the court when the case was decided. She posited that the majority’s effort to clarify the Bruen test “is a tacit admission that lower courts are struggling” to apply that test. “In my view,” she wrote, “the blame may lie with us, not with them.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also pushed back against what she characterized as a requirement of “overly specific analogues,” describing “serious problems” that would flow from such a rule. It would, she argued, require “21st-century regulations to follow late 18th-century policy choices, giving us ‘a law trapped in amber.’ And it assumes that founding-era legislatures maximally exercised their power to regulate, thereby adopting a ‘use it or lose it’ view of legislative authority.” Instead, she wrote, Bruen requires a “wider lens” that looks for a principle. Although courts should not distill these principles at too high a level of generality, she noted, the majority has not done so here.
It seems that the "Bruen test" as such has only been with us since 2022. But I'm curious if it's been referenced or used in arguments (successfully or not) in relation to other constitutional questions in US federal court, or if it has so far been used only in the context of 2nd amendment "right to carry" arguments.
