After presenting the 2025 Fulbright Don Debats Distinguished Lecture on combatting private gun violence, Visiting Scholar Professor Aaron Fellmeth shares how a US Supreme Court amicus brief sparked a global research journey. Now at Flinders, he tells us about how international human rights law can shape state responses to firearm regulation.
You recently presented the 2025 Fulbright Don DeBats Distinguished Lecture in Politics and Public Policy on combatting private gun violence. Tell us a little about your work and how you got into this space.
Approaches to reducing private gun violence tend to focus on national legal regimes and political dynamics. My goal is to elucidate precisely how the global system of international human rights law obligates states to regulate private gun violence, and what it requires of them regarding the problem of underregulated international traffic is small arms. I got into this area at first by co-authoring an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in a case seemingly confined to U.S. state obligations and rights to regulate private firearms. We lost, predictably, but it was obvious that part of the problem was (and is) the invisibility of international law to U.S. lawyers and judges–including the Supreme Court justices themselves–about the binding nature of international law under the U.S. Constitution.
What is something about your work people often misunderstand/are surprised about?
The challenge of law is that it is generally taught as a self-contained system of formal rules about procedures and behavioral controls, and it is only that in outward appearance. It is instead an organic set of practices determined by constantly evolving intersubjective belief systems among different classes of actors. That makes it impossible to pin down without studying law in social context and with an eye to its internal conflicts and contradictions. Social context includes the underlying social and cognitive psychology, sociology, economics, culture, and politics of the society involved (and, in international law, the challenge is multiplied for obvious reasons). And, because law is normative in nature, it may also involve an analysis of ethical theory implicated by interpretations of law. This is how I try to approach my work, and not every jurist understands it or finds it congenial.
As a Visiting Scholar, what are you hoping to achieve during your time at Flinders?
Take home at least one koala. Also, meet and work with more Australian scholars and deepen my familiarity with the Australian legal and political systems.
What is your proudest moment?
Not applicable. Pride is a form of self-delusion that gives us pleasure for facts or events largely or entirely exogenous to ourselves. Abandon pride, cultivate moral purpose instead.
How do you like to spend your spare time?
Kidnapping koalas. See above. Also, I enjoy traveling and photography, and I volunteer my time at a museum of ethnology (the Second Face Museum of Cultural Masks).