The Supreme Court on Monday morning added another dispute over the scope of the Second Amendment right to bear arms to its docket for the 2025-26 term. As part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Friday, the court granted review in United States v. Hemani, involving the federal government’s efforts to prosecute a Texas man for violating a federal statute that prohibits gun possession by users of illegal drugs.
The dispute began after FBI agents searched the home of Ali Danial Hemani. They found a Glock 9 mm pistol, 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine, which led prosecutors to charge him with violating the law now at the center of the case. Hemani asked the district court to dismiss the charge, arguing that applying the law to him violated the Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant granted Hemani’s request, with the government’s agreement. He relied on a 2023 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit invalidating a conviction under the same law when “the jury did not necessarily find that” the defendant in that case “was presently or even recently engaged in unlawful drug use.” The 5th Circuit upheld Mazzant’s decision.
The government came to the Supreme Court in June, asking the justices to take up the case. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer acknowledged that “[t]he Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right that is essential to ordered liberty,” and that “[u]njustifiable restrictions on that right present a grave threat to Americans’ most cherished freedoms.”
But, Sauer continued, the federal law at the center of the case is one of the “narrow circumstances in which the government may justifiably burden that right.” First, he contended, because the law bars only habitual drug users from having a gun, it “imposes a limited, inherently temporary restriction—one which the individual can remove at any time simply by ceasing his unlawful drug use.” Second, he wrote, the law “stands solidly within our Nation’s history and tradition of regulation” of firearms, a key inquiry in determining whether gun restrictions are constitutional. Sauer characterized the law as “a modest, modern analogue” of early American restrictions on the possession of guns by “habitual drunkards.” Third, he added, “habitual illegal drug users with firearms present unique dangers to society—especially because they pose a grave risk of armed, hostile encounters with police officers while impaired.”
Hemani urged the court to leave the 5th Circuit’s ruling in place. He contended that the courts of appeals are not divided over the issue, which is a criterion on which the justices often rely in deciding whether to grant review. Moreover, he suggested, his case would not be a good one in which to weigh in on the law’s constitutionality because the government did not make its arguments regarding the historical support for the law in the lower courts.
After considering the case at two consecutive conferences, the justices granted review on Monday morning. The case will likely be argued sometime early next year, with a decision to follow by late June or early July.
Two terms ago, in Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park Street, the Supreme Court ruled that an exemption to the Federal Arbitration Act for “any ‘class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce’” does not apply only to workers in the transportation industry. That case was brought by distributors for Flower Foods, the company that makes (among other things) Wonder Bread.
Flower Foods returned to the Supreme Court earlier this year in Flower Foods, Inc. v. Brock, asking the justices once again to weigh in on the scope of the FAA. This time, the question that the company has asked the court to decide is whether workers who deliver locally – here, within the state of Colorado, without ever crossing state lines – are “engaged in … interstate commerce” for purposes of the FAA exemption. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit agreed with the distributor that they are, on the theory that the products they deliver move between states. Now the Supreme Court will review the 10th Circuit’s ruling.
And in Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction, Inc., the justices will weigh in on whether someone who files for bankruptcy but does not disclose potential civil claims that they may be able to bring should be barred from later filing those claims, even if there is no evidence that they intended to mislead the bankruptcy court. The question comes to the court in the case of an Arkansas man, Thomas Keathley, who filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and – more than a year after his bankruptcy plan was approved – was in a serious accident that required surgery and physical therapy and reduced his ability to earn a living. Keathley told his bankruptcy lawyer about the accident, but his lawyer did not tell the bankruptcy court, and the construction company whose truck was responsible for the accident relied on that failure to argue that Keathley should not be able to bring a lawsuit against it. The lower courts agreed, prompting Keathley to appeal to the Supreme Court, which on Friday granted his petition for review.
The justices declined to rule on a request from an Idaho transgender athlete to dismiss her case as moot – that is, no longer a live controversy. Lindsay Hecox’s case is one of two challenges before the court to laws barring transgender women and girls from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams. Approximately two months after the justices granted review, Hecox asked the court to throw out the case, pointing to her effort to dismiss the claims in the trial court. But the justices indicated in a brief order on Monday that they would instead put off the question until the oral arguments in the case, which are likely to take place in January.
The justices’ next private conference is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 7.
