# James Ostrowski on the 1689 Arms Clause, the NY SAFE Act Reversal, and Government Takes 80%

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/james-ostrowski-on-the-1689-arms-clause-the-ny-safe-act-reversal-and-government-takes-80
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158/james-ostrowski-on-the-1689-arms-clause-the-ny-safe-act-reversal-and-government-takes-80.md
Podcast: [Consequential Actions Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/consequential-actions-podcast-7101158)
Published: 2026-09-02T20:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://jeffkellick.substack.com/p/james-ostrowski-on-the-1689-arms
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/213860977/425faad8d21a8ae338ed989a82cc1650.mp3
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Duration seconds: 4831

## Resource

I Asked a Forty-Year Appellate Lawyer What a Court Is For. He Said It Is a Bureaucracy. This is the Thursday conversation that closes week 11 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Saturday traced the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Tuesday set a written bill of rights against an unwritten one. Both stopped short of the arms clause, because that argument belongs to somebody who has carried a written liberty into a courtroom and asked a judge to honor it. James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in Buffalo, New York, in his forty-second year of practice. He took a philosophy degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a law degree from Brooklyn Law School, and he sat in Murray Rothbard’s private seminar on the history of economic thought in New York City. He served as vice chairman of the law reform committee of the New York County Lawyers Association and as chair of the human rights committee of the Erie County Bar Association, and his Cato Institute study “Thinking about Drug Legalization” appeared in May 1989, before the issue was on the national map. He is the author of thirteen books. In April 2019 he won the reversal of the first conviction ever prosecuted under the New York SAFE Act, and in May 2026 he stood for chair of the Libertarian Party, led the first ballot, and lost on the third. I asked him what the purpose of a court is, and he did not give the answer a constitutional series usually gets. Courts are a bureaucracy, he said. They act in their own interest and they are deeply ideological. Judges are politicians, and appointed judges are frequently more political than elected ones and less transparent about it, because when a handful of people put a judge on a bench nobody outside that handful can see the const…

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