Ohio Municipalities Win Expanded Procedural Rights in Firearms Case

A heated state versus city battle over firearm regulation is currently raging in Ohio. The state has passed preemption legislation it claims excludes cities from virtually any role in firearm regulation. Ohioan cities, for their part, continue to pass firearm regulation to safeguard the health, safety, and welfare of their communities, arguing that they are merely filling gaps in the state legislation, not acting in conflict with it. These clashes have resulted in numerous lawsuits and legislative changes.

Yet despite this backdrop of diametrically opposed positions and sometimes outright hostility, the state stepped in to support the procedural rights of its municipalities in the recent firearm regulation case Doe v. Columbus.

In Doe, the Supreme Court of Ohio was asked to decide whether municipalities have a right to immediately appeal a preliminary injunction blocking a duly enacted ordinance. In a 5–2 judgment reaffirming the home rule authority of Ohioan cities, the court held that they did.

The underlying case arose from a challenge to two City of Columbus ordinances passed in 2022 and 2023 regulating firearm storage around minors and magazine size. Six anonymous plaintiffs (a thorny legal issue in and of itself) challenged the ordinances, arguing that the city laws violated both a statutory prohibition on firearm regulation by cities, and Article 1, Section 4 of the Ohio Constitution, which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. The trial court sided with the anonymous plaintiffs and issued a preliminary injunction enjoining the ordinances, thus preventing the city from enforcing them.

The Ohio Court of Appeals dismissed the city’s subsequent appeal, finding that the order was not a final order and thus not subject to immediate appeal by the city.

The city then appealed that procedural question to the state supreme court. The key issue was whether a procedural statute governing the finality of judicial orders gave the city the right to immediately appeal the trial court’s injunction. Although many states spell out in their statutes that a party can appeal a preliminary injunction as a matter of course, the default rule in Ohio allows for the review of orders only after a final judgment has been issued. The relevant statute, however, provides that “an order granting or denying a ‘provisional remedy’” constitutes a final order and is subject to immediate appeal, so long as two conditions are met: first, that there are no other opportunities for the aggrieved party to obtain the remedy it seeks and nothing else the trial judge will decide with regard to the order; and second, that an appeal after the final judgment would not offer a meaningful or effective remedy to the enjoined party.

Applying this test, the Supreme Court of Ohio held that the city was entitled to appeal the preliminary injunction against its firearm regulations. The majority and one of the dissenting justices agreed that because the trial court, as a practical matter, definitively ruled that the ordinances were unconstitutional, the first condition was met. Regarding the second condition, the majority emphasized that a court’s wrongful enjoinment of a city ordinance necessarily inflicts irreparable harm. It began the journey to this conclusion by reiterating the home rule powers of Ohioan municipalities: “The Home Rule Amendment to the Ohio Constitution grants municipalities the ‘broadest possible powers of self-government in connection with all matters which are strictly local and do not impinge upon matters which are of a state-wide nature or interest.” This “full and complete political power in all matters of local self government,” the court determined, “confers on municipalities a sovereign interest in exercising police powers to enact legislation for the public good.”

This power imbues city ordinances with the same kind of democratic legitimacy enjoyed by state legislation: “Just as the General Assembly passes bills that reflect the will of Ohioans, the Columbus City Council passes ordinances that reflect the will of Columbus citizens.” The majority quoted from two U.S. Supreme Court cases, emphasizing that the state suffers irreparable injury any time it is “enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people” — and that “only an interlocutory appeal” can protect the state from that harm. “An order facially enjoining the enforcement of a duly enacted city ordinance therefore inflicts irreparable harm to the sovereign interests of that city,” the court concluded, “and an immediate appeal is necessary to provide ‘a meaningful or effective remedy’ to that city.”

In its briefing and oral argument, the state had also endorsed this view. Stepping in pursuant to a Ohio statute that allows the attorney general to appear at the state supreme court whenever the state “is directly or indirectly interested” in any civil or criminal case, the state opened its amicus brief by acknowledging that the state and the city disagreed in the strongest possible terms on the underlying merits of this case, and that the state supported the trial court’s decision below enjoining the ordinance. Nevertheless, on the specific procedural question before the court — whether a municipality has the right to immediately appeal a preliminary injunction it believes is erroneous — the state unequivocally declared that it was in full agreement with the city over the right of a municipality to bring the appeal.

Despite this interesting moment of unity between Ohio and its municipalities on this procedural point of city empowerment, however, the roaring firearm preemption conflict between states and cities in Ohio will no doubt continue apace. Now that the high court has allowed the city’s appeal to move forward, the merits of the preliminary injunction will be reviewed by the appellate court.

And another live preemption in Ohio — whether cities can regulate vaping — also continues, with the Ohio Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments next week. In that case, the state is arguing for a sea change in preemption doctrine: It is encouraging the court to abandon the Canton test, which the appellate court used to declare the state preemption law unconstitutional in the court below. In Ohio, municipalities have a home rule police power to regulate for health, welfare, and safety, but if a local regulation passed pursuant to this police power conflicts with a general law of the state, the state law preempts the local law. The four-part Canton test determines when a state statute is a general law for this purpose, and essentially requires the state to adopt “broad, uniform rules” if it wants to preempt local laws. The Canton test “protect[s] meaningful local authority,” and if this nearly twenty-five-year-old precedent were to fall, local leaders fear it would “annihilate the practical impact of municipalities’ home rule authority.” On this point, we may see the court’s confirmation that Ohioan municipalities have a sovereign interest in exercising their police powers come back into play in future preemption arguments.

Sarah L. Swan is a professor of law and Dean’s Civil Governance Scholar at Rutgers Law School.

Suggested Citation: Sarah Swan, Ohio Municipalities Win Expanded Procedural Rights in Firearms Case, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (June 5, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/ohio-municipalities-win-expanded-procedural-rights-firearms-case