LAFAYETTE, La. — When the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hawaii’s so-called “vampire rule” on concealed carry violates the Second Amendment, the majority opinion did not stop at Hawaii’s law. It called out by name a Louisiana statute from 1865 that Hawaii used to try to justify the restriction, and it was direct about what that law actually was.
The case is Wolford v. Lopez, decided 6-3 with Justice Samuel Alito writing for the majority. Louisiana’s role in it traces back to how Second Amendment cases are decided now.
How the Bruen Framework Made History Central to Every Gun Case
In 2022, the Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, establishing a new test for evaluating gun laws. If a challenged law restricts conduct covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment, the government must show the restriction is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The government does that by finding historical analogues, old laws similar enough in purpose and effect that a court can infer the modern law falls within the same tradition.
States defending gun laws after Bruen had to go digging through the historical record. Hawaii dug up something from Louisiana.
What Hawaii’s Law Did
Act 52, which Hawaii passed in 2023, created what gun-rights advocates dubbed the “vampire rule,” drawing on the old folklore that a vampire cannot enter a home without an invitation. Under the law, anyone with a concealed-carry permit who wanted to enter a privately owned business open to the public had to first obtain express permission from the property owner. Without that permission, entering while armed was a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison.
At common law, the default has always worked the other way. Opening property to the public gives everyone an implied license to enter unless the owner specifically withdraws it. Hawaii reversed that for gun owners, requiring permit holders to seek affirmative permission before walking into a gas station, grocery store, or restaurant.
Three Maui residents, Jason Wolford, Alison Wolford, and Atom Kasprzycki, and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition challenged the law in federal court in June 2023. A district court blocked it. The Ninth Circuit reinstated it in September 2024. The Supreme Court took the case in October 2025, heard argument in January 2026, and struck the law down Thursday.
Where Louisiana Came In
When Hawaii had to justify its law under the Bruen framework, it pointed to several historical statutes, and the Ninth Circuit found those analogues persuasive enough to uphold Hawaii’s rule. One of the laws it leaned on was a Louisiana statute from 1865 that prohibited entering private property with a firearm without the owner’s consent. On paper, it resembles Hawaii’s rule closely enough that courts might treat it as a historical predecessor.
The 1865 Louisiana legislature passed that firearms restriction as part of the Black Codes, the body of laws Southern states rushed to enact immediately after the Civil War to reimpose control over newly freed Black Americans. Louisiana was among the early adopters, passing its codes in 1865 alongside Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama. These laws did not merely restrict guns. They governed nearly every aspect of a freed person’s daily life: where they could live, whether they could travel, what work they could do, and whether they could assemble.
Opelousas passed local ordinances that same year prohibiting any freedman from carrying firearms without written permission from his employer. The statutes were not race-neutral regulations of public behavior. They were instruments of racial control enacted by a white political class trying to restore as much of the antebellum order as the law would allow.
The Supreme Court rejected the analogue without qualification. Alito’s majority opinion called the 1865 Louisiana statute “a tainted artifact from Louisiana’s Black Code” and said Hawaii’s reliance on it “cannot be taken seriously.” The opinion noted that the right to keep and bear arms was critically important to vulnerable Black Americans during the Reconstruction period, something the Republican Congress that drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment understood clearly. A law designed to disarm Black people and leave them defenseless against violence cannot serve as evidence of what the Second Amendment was understood to allow.
The Court added that even setting the statute’s origins aside entirely, it would still fail the Bruen test on independent grounds: it was not a widespread law, and it was not widely accepted.
What This Ruling Establishes
The Bruen framework requires courts to find historical analogues, which means someone has to search American legal history. That history includes a period when several Southern states passed laws specifically designed to oppress Black citizens. When those laws happen to restrict firearms, they can look, on the surface, like evidence that gun regulations of a certain type have deep historical roots.
Thursday’s majority drew a firm boundary. A law’s age does not cleanse its origins. A statute born from racial oppression cannot be recycled as constitutional precedent, regardless of how many years have passed or how useful it might be to a modern legal argument. When a court examines that record closely, the origins are part of the analysis.
For Louisiana, that means the state’s Black Codes remain part of the historical record and will come up again in constitutional litigation whenever someone decides those laws are convenient analogues for something new. Thursday’s ruling tells courts what to do with them.
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