Which U.S. Supreme Court case held that the Commerce Clause does not allow Congress to ban guns near schools?

United States v. Lopez held that the Commerce Clause did not authorize Congress to ban gun possession near schools.

The case arose after Texas high-school student Alfonso Lopez Jr. carried a concealed handgun into school in 1992. Federal prosecutors charged him under the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which prohibited possessing a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school. Lopez argued that Congress had exceeded its constitutional power.

In a 5–4 decision issued in 1995, the Supreme Court struck down the federal law. Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s majority opinion reasoned that possessing a gun in a school zone was non-economic conduct with no sufficiently direct connection to interstate commerce. The Court emphasized that accepting the government’s reasoning could give Congress nearly unlimited authority over local criminal activity.

Lopez did not declare school-zone gun bans generally unconstitutional; it rejected that particular federal statute as written. Congress later amended the law to include a jurisdictional requirement linking the firearm to interstate or foreign commerce. The case is commonly paired with United States v. Morrison, another important limit on Congress’s Commerce Clause power.