Deep Gulasekaram spoke to Law 360 about immigrants’ gun rights.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and nationally known scholar who has written extensively on the intersection of Second Amendment rights and immigrant rights in the wake of District of Columbia v. Heller, pointed out that the language of the amendment itself references “the people” and that Justice Scalia used the word “citizen” deliberately in the majority opinion. He called it a “sleight of hand, a way of sort of slipping that word in,” without justifying it or providing an explanation.
“Can you interpret ‘the people’ as only covering citizens?” Gulasekaram said. “That’s actually a fairly indefensible interpretation if you think that the Second Amendment is an individual right of self-defense.”