Joseph Blocher's principal academic interests include federal and state constitutional law, the First and Second Amendments, and legal history. His current scholarship addresses issues of gun rights and regulation, free speech, academic freedom, and the relationship between law and violence.
Blocher has published more than a hundred articles on those and other topics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and other leading journals, and has been cited by the Supreme Court and nearly every federal court of appeals. He is co-author of The Second Amendment: Gun Rights and Regulation (Foundation Press 2025), New Histories of Gun Rights and Regulation: Essays on the Place of Guns in American Law and Society (Oxford University Press 2023), and other books. He serves as Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the Center for Firearms Law, has testified before House and Senate committees, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Vox, and other public outlets.
Blocher returned to his hometown of Durham to join the Duke Law faculty in 2009 and received the law school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012. Before coming to Duke, he clerked for Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He also practiced law at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where he assisted the merits briefing for the District of Columbia in District of Columbia v. Heller.
He received his B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Rice University, and studied law and economic development as a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana and as a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where he received an M.Phil in Land Economy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as comments editor of the Yale Law Journal, symposium editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, notes editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, participated in or directed several clinics, and was co-chair of the Legal Services Organization.
