2020 Julie D. Fellmeth Scholar, Marcus Friedman '21 (JD Candidate) Quoted in Orange County Register on Ghost Gun Bill
SAN DIEGO (April 21, 2021) – University of San Diego (USD) School of Law’s Center for Public Interest Law (CPIL), 2020 Julie D. Fellmeth Public Interest Law Scholar, Marcus Friedman ’21 (JD Candidate) was quoted in the Orange County Register on AB 1057 (Petrie-Norris).
AB 1057 would expand California’s “red flag law,” which lets authorities temporarily seize guns from anyone shown to be a danger to themselves or others, to also cover key parts of so-called “ghost guns,” the increasingly common home-built guns that often can’t be traced. AB 1057 passed out of committee with bipartisan support on April 20, 2021.
“The law is unable to keep up with what is happening,” said Friedman. According to the article, to Friedman’s knowledge, California would be the first state to have a law connecting ghost guns and gun violence restraining orders. But given Biden’s push to promote model red flag laws, if California passes AB 1057, Friedman hopes such language will be adopted by other states down the road.
Friedman is a third-year law student at USD whose project (AB 1057) is driven by his very personal ties to the policy changes he is proposing. Not only did he survive the Las Vegas shooting on October 1, 2017, but his hometown is Parkland, Florida, where just months after the Las Vegas shooting, another mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School tragically impacted his community.
As the recipient of the 2020–2021 Julie D. Fellmeth Public Interest Law Scholarship, Friedman is transforming these horrific experiences into the catalyst to create positive social change through the legal system.
To read the full article by Brooke Staggs in the Orange County Register click here.
To read more about the Julianne D. Fellmeth Public Interest Law Scholarship click here.
About Center for Public Interest Law
Founded in 1980, the University of San Diego School of Law’s Center for Public Interest Law (CPIL) serves as an academic center of research and advocacy in regulatory and public interest law. CPIL focuses its efforts on the study of an extremely powerful, yet often overlooked, level of government: state regulatory agencies. Under the supervision of experienced public interest attorneys and advocates, CPIL law student interns study California agencies that regulate business, professions, and trades.
CPIL publishes the California Regulatory Law Reporter, a unique legal journal that covers the activities and decisions of over 12 major California regulatory agencies.
In addition to its academic program, CPIL has an advocacy component. Center faculty, professional staff, and interns represent the interests of the unorganized and underrepresented in California’s legislature, courts, and regulatory agencies. CPIL attempts to make the regulatory functions of California government more efficient and visible by serving as a public monitor of state regulatory activity. The Center has been particularly active in reforming the state’s professional discipline systems for attorneys and physicians, and in advocating public interest reforms to the state’s open meetings and public records statutes.
About the University of San Diego School of Law
Each year, USD educates approximately 800 Juris Doctor and graduate law students from throughout the United States and around the world. The law school is best known for its offerings in the areas of business and corporate law, constitutional law, intellectual property, international and comparative law, public interest law and taxation.
USD School of Law is one of the 84 law schools elected to the Order of the Coif, a national honor society for law school graduates. The law school’s faculty is a strong group of outstanding scholars and teachers with national and international reputations and currently ranks 36th nationally among U.S. law faculties in scholarly impact and 22nd nationally in past-year faculty downloads on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). The school is accredited by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. Founded in 1954, the law school is part of the University of San Diego, a private, independent, Roman Catholic university chartered in 1949.