On Monday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plunged Indiana Republican Congresswoman Victoria Spartz into legal trouble after detecting an unloaded handgun in her baggage. Like the thousands of other Americans caught in a similar situation each year, Rep. Spartz may unexpectedly benefit from a new Supreme Court ruling against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Just a few days before Spartz’s incident, the Supreme Court held in SEC v. Jarkesy that individuals have a right to seek trial by jury before an administrative agency imposes civil monetary penalties “designed to punish or deter the wrongdoer.”  The immediate effect of this decision will likely be felt by the more than 6,700 Americans who accidentally brought a firearm into an airport checkpoint last year alone. 

Technically, it is a federal felony to attempt to board a commercial aircraft while carrying a concealed weapon. But the penalties are so harsh that the federal government declines to prosecute the vast majority of cases, which involve otherwise law-abiding gun owners who forgot that they had weapons in their briefcases, purses, and other bags. Rep. Spartz claimed in a statement to the Associated Press that she mistakenly had the weapon in a pocket of her suitcase.

The TSA usually imposes civil monetary penalties instead of federal felony charges. This year, these penalties (which are indexed to inflation) can run as high as $15,000, although the TSA fines a person $3,000 for “[a] typical first offense.”  Violators may also face criminal charges under state or local law.  

Until Jarkesy, individuals had little recourse against a TSA fine. They could appeal within the agency. If unsuccessful, they could seek review in the courts, but judges have tended to give deference to the TSA’s findings. Using civil fines and administrative processes, TSA essentially ran its own misdemeanor justice system.

That may end. Jarkesy will likely mandate that the government cannot pursue a civil fine unless it brings a proceeding in a federal court and tries the case before a jury. These penalties are clearly intended to punish individuals who bring weapons to checkpoints. TSA even refers to them as a fine for committing “an offense.”

If a jury trial is imposed, it will be time-consuming and expensive for both the government and the defendant. And juries may produce inconsistent results. Some juries may find people in violation of the regulation, believing that gun owners are automatically responsible for the location of their weapons. Others, however, may refuse to impose liability out of sympathy with those who “forgot” that they were carrying their weapons.

The net effect on enforcement will be uncertain. On the one hand, the expense and uncertainty of bringing these cases before juries may cause the government to offer compromise civil fines on terms more favorable to gun owners. On the other, the government may try to coerce individuals to forgo civil jury trials by threatening to bring federal felony charges against those who resist paying fines. In either case, this decision is likely to have a significant practical effect on federal enforcement of the prohibition against carrying weapons into commercial airports. 

However, there is still some uncertainty about whether Jarkesy will be expanded to TSA-type civil penalties. Jarkesy involved the right to a civil jury trial under the Seventh Amendment. The Supreme Court held that the defendant had a right to a jury because the SEC’s administrative action heavily resembled a traditional common-law cause of action for civil fraud. In the TSA enforcement context, the federal government may argue that there is no traditional common-law civil analogue. 

And they may have a point: the nearest analogue to TSA’s enforcement is not a common-law civil cause of action but a criminal offense. Criminal offenses also require jury trials, except for some minor offenses designated as “petty.”  TSA’s enforcement actions carry no imprisonment, but the fines far exceed those commonly imposed on petty offenses.

Jarkesy was not the only administrative law case handed down by the Court last week that could have an impact on gun owners. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned “Chevron deference,” a legal doctrine in which courts would often defer to executive agencies’ interpretation of statutes when those statutes were silent or ambiguous. The basic idea of Chevron deference was that courts would treat congressional silence or ambiguity as an implied delegation to administrative agencies to make rules that would resolve the ambiguities.

Gun owners may feel Loper-Bright’s impact at the margins. Some courts would use Chevron deference to defer to rules and determinations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), particularly when they thought it was a close case. In Guedes v. ATF, a DC circuit panel thought that ATF’s classification of bump stocks as machineguns deserved deference. The Supreme Court, however, ultimately overturned that decision in Cargill v. Garland, which it issued days before overturning Chevron in Loper Bright.

Of the two decisions, Loper-Bright may have the most far-reaching impact on administrative law generally, but gun owners will likely feel it less. 

Most ATF regulations interpret criminal statutes, and courts have hesitated to afford Chevron deference for them. Many ATF regulations, moreover, are pursuant to express statutory delegations from Congress. These include, for example, the Gun Control Act’s importation law, which requires ATF to determine whether the firearm is generally “suitable for sporting purposes.” Loper-Bright will not affect these kinds of delegations, leaving ATF with substantial rulemaking authority.

The same can not be said for TSA civil penalties. Jarkesy will force agencies to reconsider how they bring cases in which they seek civil penalties. They will have to test many of these cases in federal courts, with defendants entitled to jury trials. That could directly impact tens of thousands of gun owners who accidentally bring their weapons to TSA security checkpoints over the next decade alone.