A recent Delaware Superior Court decision recognized the fundamental natural right of self-defense for young adults when it held that a statute that criminalized the purchase of most firearms by Delawareans 18-to-20-years-old violated Article I, Section 20 of the Delaware Constitution, the State’s analogue to the Second Amendment. This may seem far afield from the corporate and commercial decisions that this blog focuses on, but because the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the right to keep and bear arms, as the core of the right to self-defense, to be a natural right that all persons are born with and that the U. S. Constitution has recognized, this decision should be of interest to everyone.

The decision on August 29, 2025, in Birney v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security, was highlighted in a YouTube video by constitutional law scholar Mark Smith at the following link. With the collaboration of many people, I successfully argued this case.

In addition to my corporate and commercial litigation practice, I have been privileged to win all of the decisions (to my knowledge) in Delaware—after appeals have been exhausted on the merits—in the civil rights cases that have challenged statutes and regulations based on the right to keep and bear arms, and that have defined the outer limits of those rights, under the Delaware Constitution’s counterpart to the Second Amendment.