Don Kates is not a conservative or libertarian but a liberal. While still a Yale Law student he spent the summer of 1963 as a civil rights worker in the South where he had, on his person or in his car, multiple firearms. For the next two years he worked on civil rights litigation as an unpaid law clerk for famed civil rights lawyer William Kunstler.

Kates is a life long member of the ACLU and a former professor of Constitutional Law and Criminal Law. His first decade in practice was with legal services for the poor where he handled multiple cases in the U.S. and CA Supreme Courts. Currently he has a civil liberties and rights practice mostly involving the right to arms. His law partner was the first chairman of the American branch of Amnesty International.

Kates’ gun cases have included two invalidating municipal handgun bans in CA appellate courts and work on Second Amendment issues in federal intermediate appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, inter alia Nordyke v. County of Alameda, — F3d ---- (April 20. 2009) which held that the Second Amendment applies against state and local entities.

Kates is an internationally recognized criminologist who has taught at Stanford and spoken or lectured at Oxford University, the Australian Institute of Criminology and the Universities of Melbourne and Western Australia In 2003 and 2004 he gave presentations on the human right to arms for defense against genocide to the UN Subcommittee on the Preservation of Human Rights in Geneva. (They were NOT receptive.)

In 2007 he was deeply involved in the litigation which culminated in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008), the case which invalidated Washington D.C.’s gun bans as contrary to the Second Amendment.

Books, and scholarly journals he has edited or authored or co-authored include: RESTRICTING HANDGUNS (1979); firearms regulation issue of LAW & POLICY Q. (v. 5, # 3, 1983); FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE: ISSUES OF REGULATION (1983); firearms regulation issue of LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS (v. 49 # 1, 1986); THE GREAT AMERICAN GUN DEBATE: ESSAYS ON FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE (Pacific Research, 1997); ARMED: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON GUN CONTROL (Prometheus, 2001).

His other scholarly publications include:

* "Abolition: Deportation, Integration: Attitudes Toward Slavery in the Early Republic," 53 J. NEGRO HISTORY 33 (1968)

* "Immunity of State Judges Under the Federal Civil Rights Acts," 65 NORTHWESTERN L. REV. 615 (1970)

* "Liability of Public Entities Under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act," 45 U.S.C. L. REV. 131 (1972)

* "Mootness in Judicial Proceedings: Toward a Coherent Theory," 62 CAL. L. REV. 1385 (1974)

* "Mexican Americans, Racial Discrimination and the Civil Rights Act of 1866," 63 CAL. L. REV. 662 (1975)

* "Deadly Force Self Defense Against Rape," 15 U.C.-DAVIS L. REV.,(1982)

* "Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment," 83 MICH. L. REV. 204 (1983)

* entry on the Second Amendment in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION (1986)

* "The Second Amendment: A Dialogue," 49 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 143 (1986)

* "Firearms and Violence: Old Premises, Current Evidence" in 1 T. Gurr (ed.) VIOLENCE IN AMERICA (1989)

* "The Value of Civilian Arms Possession as Deterrent to Crime or Defense Against Crime," 18 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW 113 (1991)

* "The Second Amendment and the Ideology of Self-Protection," 9 CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY 87 (1992).

* "The Second Amendment and States' Rights: A Thought Experiment," 36 WM. & M. L. REV. 1737 (1995)

* "Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda," 62 TENN. L. REV. 513-596 (1995)

* "Of Genocide and Disarmament," 86 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOL. 247 (1995)

* "Under Fire: The New Consensus on the Second Amendment," 45 EMORY L. J. 1139 (1996)

* "American Homicide Exceptionalism," 69 U. COLO. L. REV. 969-1007 (1998)

* "Of Holocausts and Gun Control," 75 WASHINGTON U. L. Q. 1237 (1998)

* "Long Term Non-Relationship of Firearm Availability to Homicide" 4 HOMICIDE STUDIES 185-201 (2000)

* "Do Guns Cause Crime?" History News Network, July 22, 2002

* "Guns, Atomic Weapons, and Common Sense." History News Network Sept. 16, 2002 (but they retitled it "Shouldn't People Who Favor Gun Control Favor War in Iraq?")

* "Democide & Disarmament," SAIS REVIEW v. XXIII, no. 1 (2003)

* "Genocide, Murder and the Human Right [under international law] to Defend One’s Life," in SMALL ARMS SURVEY (Geneva, Switzerland, Swiss Small Arms Survey 2004)

* The Limits of Gun Control: A Criminological Perspective" in Timothy Lytton, ed., SUING THE FIREARMS INDUSTRY: A LEGAL BATTLE AT THE CROSSROADS OF GUN CONTROL AND MASS TORTS (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005)

"The Hopelessness of Trying to Disarm the Kind of People who Murder," 12 BRIDGES 313-330 (2005)

"Genocide. Self-Defense and the Right to Arms" 29 HAMLINE LAW REVIEW 502 (2006).

"Local Gun Bans in California: A Futile Exercise," 41 USF Law Review 333 (2007).

"Genocide, Murder, and the Fundamental Human Right to Defend One’s Life," 2 JOURNAL OF LAW, ECONOMICS & POLICY 309 (2007).

"Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?: A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence" 30 HARVARD JOURNAL OF LAW & Public Policy (2007)

"A Modern Historiography of the Second Amendment," 56 U.C.L.A L. Rev. 1211 (2009)

"Second Amendment Limitations and Criminological Considerations," 60 Hastings Law Journal 1339 (2009).

"Second Amendment: Historical and Policy Issues," forthcoming, U. Of Santa Clara Law Review," 2010

NOTE: many of the foregoing were co-authored.

Having specialized in police litigation, he has written several manuals on that subject including one published by ABA-ALI and several co-authored with ACLU special counsel Amitai Schwartz and published by the Practicing Law Institute.