Recommended Citation
Dana Raigrodski, Winning the Battle, Losing the War: Rahimi, Women, and the Supreme Court, 49 S. Ill. U. L.J. 385 (2025), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/1133
Publication Title
Southern Illinois University Law Journal
Keywords
Domestic Violence, Intimate Partner Violence, second amendment, firearms, United States v. Rahimi
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Domestic violence and DV-related firearm use are a grave and persistent issue in the United States and have an extensive harmful and deadly impact in the lives of many women. In its 2024 Rahimi decision, the United States Supreme Court held that, as applied to the facts of the case, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which bans firearms possession by those subject to a DV protective order, is facially constitutional under the Second Amendment. The Court upheld § 922(g)(8) under Bruen’s “Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulations” test, finding that founding era laws included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms. Yet, this Article argues, a close read of Rahimi reveals that women and their lived experiences continue to be erased in the Court’s recent jurisprudence, in a manner that undermines efforts to address gender-based violence and perpetuates women’s structural marginalization and ultimately the dynamics that feed the IPV epidemic. Except for scant mention when invoking historical surety laws to prevent spousal abuse, the Court’s analysis does not discuss either IPV in general or the specific role of firearms within IPV. This Article uses a feminist IPV-centered lens to suggest that the Rahimi Court could have and should have stayed true to its history and tradition analytical framework, while nonetheless centering women’s voices and highlighting the severe and unique threat of harm posed to mostly women by their abusers, especially when firearms are present. In doing so, the Court could have enriched its analysis of the historical dangerousness analogues, could have engaged in a more nuanced and inclusive discussion of the two proclaimed anchors of the Second Amendment—the home and self-defense, and, to contextualize and explain some of the perceived historical gaps, could have sent a strong message by explicitly acknowledging that our history and our laws were built on various forms of gendered bigotry and exclusion of women from the polity