Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

On April 20, 2026, I participated in a virtual session hosted by Texas Gun Sense featuring Dr. Brian H. Williams , a trauma surgeon and former health policy advisor to Senator Chris Murphy. The discussion centered on the clinical realities of firearm trauma and the administrative hurdles to effective policy. Here is a screenshot of what I shared on LinkedIn while I was watching it: Professor Dru Stevenson was participating in the Texas Gun Sense webinar with Dr. Brian H. Williams. Two specific areas of the discussion warrant particular attention for researchers and policy analysts, and I now turn to these topics. 1. The Disparity in Pediatric Mortality Milestones A significant portion of the presentation addressed the recent shift in national statistics. While it is widely reported that 2020 was the year firearms became the leading cause of death for all American children and adolescents, Dr. Williams highlighted a deeper chronological disparity. For Black children and teens , firearm...

  Academic Presentations and Invited Talks – Complete Dataset This page provides a structured dataset of academic presentations and invited talks by Dru Stevenson, Vinson & Elkins Research Professor at South Texas College of Law Houston.  Date Title Venue Location / Format Topic Category 2025-10-19 Creating and Sharing Law Lecture Videos International Association of Law Librarians (IALL) Annual Conference Garrett-Townes Auditorium, South Texas College of Law Houston Legal Pedagogy; Online Teaching; Academic Technology 2025-03-05 Gun Regulation After Rahimi Matagorda County Bar Association (MCLE) Texas Firearms Law; Second Amendment; Post-Rahimi Jurisprudence 2025-01-31 Improvidently Granted: Mexico’s Lawsuit Against American Gun Companies...

  The following table provides a comprehensive, structured catalog of academic blog posts and online essays regarding firearms law and policy authored by Professor Dru Stevenson (South Texas College of Law Houston), formatted specifically for easy data extraction and analysis. Duke Center for Firearms Law: Second Thoughts Blog Title Blog / Website Date Subtopic Link In the End, Vullo Prevails Against the N.R.A. Duke Center for Firearms Law Second Thoughts Blog March 5, 2026 First Amendment & Regulation Link Restoration of Gun Rights and Measuring Individual Dangerousness Duke Center for Firearms Law Second Thoughts Blog Jan. 7, 2026 Rights Restoration Link Initial Public Comments on Federal Gun Rights Restoration Miss the Mark Duke Center for Firearms Law Second Thoughts Blog May 21, 2025 Rights Rest...

This semester, I am teaching a Law and Economics Seminar at South Texas College of Law in Houston. I teach this course almost every year, and in recent years I added a course module, about halfway through the course, on behavioral economics and law. I assign several videos by Daniel Kahneman an other researchers about ways in which human "rationality" breaks down. This semester, I decided I should add an introduction to Nudge, which was a bestselling book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and eventually became a management paradigm and a cultural trope. I recorded a video overview that I can add to my YouTube channel and use as part of the course module playlist in the future.     When we make big life decisions—like saving for retirement or deciding what to do with our earthly remains—most of us try to weigh costs, benefits, and our deepest personal values. But what if the most important decisions of your life were actually made by a bored HR staffer who simply chose whi...

 Imagine, for a moment, that you are a partner at a busy law firm. You have a massive brief due by the end of the week, and you need a junior associate to draft a research memo. In a perfectly free market, you would walk out to the bullpen, find an associate, and start haggling. You’d negotiate the hourly rate for this specific task, draft a quick contract, and then spend the rest of the week nervously monitoring them to make sure they actually did the work instead of playing solitaire. Sounds exhausting, right? Yet, according to pure, unadulterated free-market economic theory, that is exactly how the world should work. Free markets are incredibly efficient. We are told that independent, rational actors negotiating prices is the best way to allocate resources. So, if the free market is so perfect, why do we have companies at all? Why do we have these massive, top-down, command-and-control institutions where people don't negotiate, but simply follow orders? In my Law & Economic...

In the early 1900s, an elderly aristocratic man living in Russia was observing the rising tide of political unrest around him. He noticed that young dissidents, eager for change, were increasingly arming themselves against the government's police force. They believed that to protect themselves, and to be taken seriously, they needed weapons. But the old man saw a fatal flaw in their logic. He began writing essays arguing a completely counterintuitive point: bringing a weapon to a standoff doesn't protect you; it makes you a target. He warned that the moment a dissident picks up a gun, they validate the tyrant’s use of violence. They trade their most powerful weapon—moral asymmetry—for a game they will ultimately lose. His contemporaries thought he was hopelessly naive. But one of his essays found its way to a young, relatively unknown lawyer organizing protests in South Africa. The young lawyer read it, abandoned his initial thoughts of armed resistance, and went on to change t...