Dave Kopel is Research Director of the Independence Institute; an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, in Washington; and a Senior Fellow at the University of Wyoming College of Law Firearms Research Center. His website is davekopel.org. He writes frequent for the Volokh Conspiracy law blog, hosted by Reason magazine.

Kopel writes on constitutional law, criminal justice, civil rights, firearms policy, international affairs, technology, politics, environmental policy, and the media. He is the author of 20 books, over a thousand newspaper and magazine articles, and over a hundred scholarly journal articles. His newspaper articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Among his journal publications are articles in journals from Yale, Harvard, NYU, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania. His briefs have been cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justices Alito, Breyer, Kagan, Stevens, and Thomas. Overall, he has been cited in over a hundred judicial opinions and over 700 law review articles. The Seventh Circuit described his scholarship as a correct model of “originalist interpretive method as applied to the Second Amendment.”

Kopel’s book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? was named book of the year by the American Society of Criminology, Division of International Criminology. Before joining the Independence Institute, Kopel served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Colorado, dealing with enforcement of hazardous waste, Superfund, and other environmental laws. In 1998-99, he served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. He holds a J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, and a B.A. in History with honors from Brown University, where he won the National Geographic Society prize for best history thesis, about the historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.