The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit granted en banc rehearing on December 11 in Koons v. Platkin and its consolidated companion, Siegel v. Platkin, vacating a 2-1 panel decision that had upheld the bulk of New Jersey’s post-Bruen sensitive-places law. Every active judge on the circuit will now reconsider whether New Jersey can keep licensed carry-permit holders disarmed across dozens of categories of public space. I have been following this litigation closely, and I think the timing of this grant is the whole story.
A Panel That Waited Too Long
The panel heard oral argument in Koons and Siegel nearly two years before it ruled. Only in September 2025 — amended September 17 — did it issue a 2-1 decision upholding most of New Jersey’s Chapter 131 sensitive-places restrictions, the sprawling list of gun-free zones the legislature enacted in December 2022 in direct response to New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Judge Cheryl Ann Krause wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Cindy K. Chung. Judge David J. Porter dissented, criticizing the majority’s reliance on historical analogies far removed from the Founding era.
A two-year gap between argument and decision is not ordinary caution. It is a delay with consequences, and in this instance the consequences ran against the panel’s own outcome. Every American lawyer, scholar, and advocate who works in this space needs to understand that a single ruling never exists in isolation — it moves everything connected to it, the way pulling one strand of a web moves the whole structure. Here, the panel’s own delay is what handed the plaintiffs their opening.
Personnel Changed While the Panel Sat
While Koons and Siegel sat undecided, the composition of the Third Circuit changed. Emil J. Bove III was confirmed to the circuit on July 29, 2025. Jennifer L. Mascott was confirmed on October 9, 2025. Both are Trump appointees, and both joined a circuit that, with their addition, now leans decidedly toward the originalist, text-and-history methodology Bruen commands. Had the panel issued its decision months earlier — before Judge Bove and Judge Mascott took their seats — the odds of securing en banc review would have been far lower. Instead, the panel’s delay pushed the case into the window in which the newly reconstituted, active-judge majority could grant rehearing, which is exactly what it did on December 11, in an order from Chief Judge Michael A. Chagares vacating the September panel opinion and judgment.
This is not an isolated data point. The same reconstituted court had already ordered en banc rehearing, sua sponte, in Cheeseman v. Platkin and its companion, Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Platkin — the challenge to New Jersey’s AR-15 ban — before the three-judge panel in that case could even issue its own decision. En banc argument in Cheeseman was held October 15, 2025, and that decision remains pending as well. Two separate Second Amendment cases, both pulled away from panels and placed before the full court, in the span of a few months. That is not coincidence. That is a circuit actively electing to police the Second Amendment as a first-class constitutional right rather than search for reasons to excuse its violation.
What Remains in Effect Right Now
The en banc grant does not, by itself, restore the injunction that Chief Judge Renée Marie Bumb of the District of New Jersey issued in her 230-page opinion of May 16, 2023, which found most of the sensitive-places law likely unconstitutional. The panel’s earlier stay of that injunction remains in force. The panel did carve out three exceptions and kept them enjoined: the so-called “vampire rule,” which barred carrying on private property open to the public absent the owner’s affirmative permission; the mandatory liability-insurance requirement for permit holders; and the prohibition on a loaded firearm in a vehicle. Those three protections stand. Everything else New Jersey designated as a sensitive place remains enforceable while the en banc court does its work, and gun owners should continue to comply with the law as it currently stands.
The Doctrinal Fight Ahead
I want the en banc court to reaffirm those three panel holdings and go further. If government is going to designate a location a gun-free zone and strip citizens of the means of self-defense there, it should be required to substitute comprehensive security — metal detectors and armed personnel — as the price of that designation. I also want the court to reject the panel’s reliance on Reconstruction-era and late-nineteenth-century statutes as evidence of the Second Amendment’s meaning. Those laws can serve, at most, a confirmatory role; the operative inquiry is the public understanding of the right in 1791, when the Amendment was ratified, not the enactments of a generation born decades after the Founders had died. Chief Judge Bumb’s own injunction opinion drew on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment criminologist Cesare Beccaria, whose warning that disarmament laws benefit only criminals at the expense of the law-abiding I have written about in my own scholarship. I expect the en banc court to take that reasoning, not the panel’s, as its starting point.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.