Georgetown Center for the Constitution Awards Cooley Book Prize to Law Professors Robert J. Cottrol, L’84, of George Washington University and Brannon P. Denning of Samford University

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Georgetown Center for the Constitution is pleased to announce that Robert J. Cottrol, L’84, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and Professor of History and Sociology in the Columbian College at George Washington University, and Brannon P. Denning, Starnes Professor of Law at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law, have been awarded the 2025 Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize of $50,000 for their book To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment (University Press of Kansas, 2023).

In To Trust the People with Arms, Cottrol and Denning examine the historical, legal and cultural underpinnings of the Second Amendment, offering an in-depth exploration of the Supreme Court’s evolving jurisprudence surrounding the right to keep and bear arms. Their work provides a balanced and scholarly treatment of a deeply contested constitutional issue, situating the Second Amendment within broader questions of liberty, government power and historical interpretation.

Upon receiving the award, Cottrol said: “As a legal historian, I feel greatly honored to share this important award with my collaborator and friend Brannon Denning. In constitutional law, as in many other areas, a look at history with a realization of its nuances and complexities can tell us about the roads we have traveled from our past to the present. It can also be a critical guide to the roads we can and perhaps should take to the future.”

Denning responded: “I am grateful and humbled to share this award from the Center with my co-author Bob Cottrol. It is especially flattering to receive an award previously given to my idols of constitutional scholarship.”

The 2025 Cooley Prize will be presented at the Center’s annual gala, to be held at the National Archives in May 2025. The event will also feature the 2025 Thomas M. Cooley Judicial Lecture.

Professor Randy Barnett, Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, praised the selection: “While other scholarship, including my own, has focused on the original meaning of the Second Amendment, this book traces the treatment given that amendment from the founding until today by Congress and state legislatures, by state and federal courts and eventually by the U.S. Supreme Court. Cottrol and Denning situate their narrative in the political movements for gun control that arose in the 20th century in response to gang violence in the 1920s and to the explosion of street crime in the 1960s. I learned a ton from reading this book.”

Dean William M. Treanor of Georgetown Law remarked: “I applaud the Center for the Constitution for their ongoing efforts to recognize so many distinguished books and authors. I would like to offer my congratulations to this year’s Cooley Book Prize winners, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning, for their research on the complex legal history of the second amendment. We are particularly proud that one of our graduates, Robert Cottrol, is one of the esteemed authors.”

The Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize, Symposium & Judicial Lecture honors Thomas McIntyre Cooley, a longstanding chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and a professor and dean at the University of Michigan Law School. Cooley authored several highly influential books, including A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (1868).

Past Cooley Prize winners are:

• Yale Law Professor Jack M. Balkin for Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation (Yale, 2024)
• Walter Stahr for Salmon Chase: Lincoln’s Vital Rival (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
• Stanford Law Professor Michael W. McConnell for The President Who Would Not Be King (Princeton, 2020)
• Princeton University Professor Sean Wilentz for No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Harvard, 2018)
• Yale Law Professor Keith Whittington for Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (Kansas, 2019)
• Harvard Law Professor Richard H. Fallon, Jr. for Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court (Harvard, 2018)
• Boston University School of Law Professor Gary Lawson and IDC Herzliya-Radzyner School of Law Professor Guy Seidman for A Great Power of Attorney: Understanding the Fiduciary Constitution (Kansas, 2017)