Massachusetts courts have recognized self-defense as a defense to homicide as far back as the trial following the Boston Massacre in 1770, where John Adams successfully defended all but one of a group of British soldiers who had fired into a crowd of protesters that had thrown objects at them.…
The nineteenth-century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville famously described the jury in the United States as “a free school which is always open and in which each juror learns his rights,” making it not only “the most energetic means of making the people rule,” but also “the most efficacious means…
As we recently wrote, states’ firearms regulations have faced legal challenges across the country since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which held that individuals have a Second Amendment right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. But how…