Don Kates

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Don Kates is a retired professor of constitutional and criminal law, and a criminologist associated with the Pacific Research Institute (San Francisco). He is co-author of Armed: New Perspectives On Gun Control (Prometheus, 2001). As a civil liberties lawyer he has represented gun owners attacking the constitutionality of certain firearms laws.

Don B. Kates, Jr., attended Reed College and Yale Law School. During the Civil Rights Movement, he worked in the South for civil rights lawyers including William Kunstler. Thereafter, he specialized in civil rights and police misconduct litigation for the federal War on Poverty program. After three years of teaching constitutional law, criminal law, and criminal procedure at St. Louis University Law School, he returned to San Francisco where he currently practices law, teaches, and writes on criminology. He is editor of Firearms and Violence: Issues of Public Policy (San Francisco: 1984, Pacific Research Institute) and the Winter 1986 issue of Law & Contemporary Problems. He is author of the entry on the Second Amendment in M. Levy & K. Karst, The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution; "Firearms and Violence: Old Premises, Current Evidence," in T. Gurr (ed.), Violence in America (1989); and "Precautionary Handgun Ownership: Reasonable Choice or Dangerous Delusion," B. Danto (ed.), Gun Control and Criminal Homicide, forthcoming (1990).