Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has told The Wall Street Journal that he is not going anywhere. That single answer reshapes the most consequential Second Amendment term in a generation. When the Supreme Court takes up Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, and Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238 — consolidated for a single argument on whether the Constitution protects AR-15-platform rifles — the justice who has done more than nearly anyone to build the modern right to keep and bear arms will be on the bench to decide them.
”Obviously, I’m Here for Another Term”
Speaking with James Taranto of the Journal, Alito, who is 76, disposed of the retirement question in six words: “Obviously, I’m here for another term.” Asked about the pressure conservatives place on aging justices — the anxiety that a Republican appointee might repeat Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision to stay past the moment a friendly president could name her successor — he was characteristically dry:
It’s not pleasant, in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality. It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.
The speculation had a plausible hook. Alito has a book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, arriving in early October, and a departing justice with a book tour is a familiar Washington sequence. He has now foreclosed that reading.
No Justice Has Built More of the Modern Second Amendment
Justice Thomas is the more celebrated Second Amendment vote, deservedly so. The case for Alito is at least as strong.
He wrote the controlling opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), holding the right to keep and bear arms fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty and therefore enforceable against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Without McDonald, Heller is a decision about the District of Columbia and nothing more.
Six years later came Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411 (2016), in which the Court held per curiam that stun guns are “arms” within the meaning of the Second Amendment. Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, concurred in the judgment and made the argument at length, taking apart the Massachusetts court’s reasoning one rationale at a time. That conclusion carries more weight than it is usually given credit for. A stun gun is not a firearm. Had the Amendment reached only firearms, Caetano comes out the other way. The Amendment protects arms, and that category is wider than guns.
This past June he wrote for the Court in Wolford v. Lopez, striking down Hawaii’s rule that barred licensed carriers from private property open to the public absent the owner’s express permission — a regime that made every storefront a gun-free zone by default.
The Unfinished Business of Snope
When the Court denied certiorari in Snope v. Brown in June 2025, leaving undisturbed the Fourth Circuit’s approval of Maryland’s ban on AR-15s, Justices Alito and Gorsuch noted they would have granted review, and Justice Thomas dissented from the denial. Justice Kavanaugh, writing separately, called the decision below questionable and said the Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.”
That clock has run. On June 30, 2026, the Court granted certiorari in Grant v. Higgins and Viramontes v. Cook County and consolidated them, taking Connecticut’s ban and Cook County’s ordinance together on one question: whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect AR-15-platform and similar semiautomatic rifles. That question should have been settled years ago. The Court is at last getting to it, and I am confident Alito will be in the majority that puts these state and local bans to rest.
A Retraction Worth Remembering
On June 30 — the final opinion day of the term — NPR reported that Alito was retiring. He was not. Nina Totenberg, who has covered the Court for more than fifty years, retracted the story and read her letter of apology to the Justice on air, explaining that she had left the courtroom early and, on hearing that “retirement announcements” were underway, assumed the singular.
I take her at her word that the error was hers alone. I would observe only that a correspondent of that tenure making that error, on that day, about that justice, is a coincidence worth noticing.
December, and Then June
The Court has not yet published its argument calendar. My expectation is argument in the first week of December and a decision at the end of June 2027 — the slot the Court reserves for the term’s defining case. Alito is 76, and he has just told the country he intends to serve. The unfinished business of Snope will be finished with him on the bench.
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.