State Courts State cases come to the United States Supreme Court from the highest appellate courts of the states. Under its discretionary authority to accept or reject cases, and in keeping with its own rules of
standing to sue, the Court accepts less than 10 percent of all state appeals. State cases also come to the Court from
lower federal court rulings on cases originating in state courts. Included in this category are disputes removed from a state to a federal court, federal court injunctions halting state court proceedings, and federal court issuance of
habeas corpus writs to state prisoners claiming violation of federal rights (see
Removal of Cases).
Relations between federal and state courts are referred to as “judicial federalism.” As legally established and commonly understood, judicial federalism denotes a hierarchical arrangement. The federal Constitution establishes a national court system and stipulates that inconsistencies between federal and state law are to be resolved in favor of the former and that state judges are bound by this principle. Thus state courts must give precedence to federal over state law and interpret federal law in line with current rulings of the Supreme Court. Federal statutes that authorize Supreme Court review of state supreme court decisions on federal law as well as statutes that vest lower federal courts with jurisdiction over federal questions formerly adjudicated in state courts are intended to ensure the supremacy of federal law. Under the leadership of Chief Justice John
Marshall (1801–1835), the Court, against strong state court opposition, successfully reserved for itself the final authority to determine whether state law comported with the federal Constitution, laws, and treaties.
Despite its dominant role in the system of judicial federalism, the Supreme Court has instituted practices that preserve the integrity and autonomy of state law and state courts. The observance of
comity assures respectful recognition of the laws and judicial decisions of the states. The
”independent and adequate state ground” doctrine requires Supreme Court acceptance of state court interpretation of state constitutions and statutes provided state law does not violate the federal Constitution, the state court's judgment is solidly based in state law, and its reasoning does not rely on federal judicial precedent.
Further, the Court will not review state court judgments unless
federal questions have been raised early in the proceedings, thereby allowing their full consideration at all state court levels; nor will the Court consider appeals when those raising federal claims have failed to comply with state court procedures. It has also held that habeas corpus petitions may not be considered until a prisoner has exhausted all state remedies. Finally, the principle of “equitable abstention” encourages the Court to stay its hand until a state court has had an opportunity to rule in a manner that might preclude Court review (see
Abstention Doctrine).
The Constitution and federal statutes indicate a command‐obedience relationship between the highest federal and state courts, and state court autonomy could be viewed as existing at the sufferance of the Supreme Court. In reality, the interactions between the Supreme Court and state high courts are shifting and multifarious, reflecting the Court's perspectives on its role in the federal system, its policy preferences, and state court response to its mandates. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by federal and state high court management of civil liberties questions during the twentieth century.
Until shortly after
World War I, a division of labor characterized the relationship between the two judicial systems. State guarantees were enforced in state courts; federal guarantees (namely, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, or the
Bill of Rights) were enforced in federal courts. In effect, federal and state courts went their separate ways.
In the subsequent three decades, the Court cautiously extended its supervisory authority over state courts. Typically it invalidated state decisions involving individual rights on
Fourteenth Amendment due process and
equal protection grounds. On the rare occasion that it based a holding on the applicability of the Bill of Rights to the states it was because the constitutional guarantees in question, notably freedom of the press, speech, and religion, were, as the Court explained, “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” During these years, the Court resisted arguments that state criminal defendants enjoy the same protections as the
Fourth,
Fifth,
Sixth,
Seventh, and
Eighth Amendments provided federal defendants. Instead, in order to determine the constitutionality of treatment accorded the accused, the Court relied upon judicially established Fourteenth Amendment due process standards such as the “fair trial rule” for defendants unrepresented by counsel and the “shock the conscience test” for defendants subjected to egregious searches and seizures.
The Court's fundamental fairness and due process precepts, enunciated to provide state courts with the leeway to develop acceptable protections of the accused, were considered vague and subjective. Some state judges made conscientious efforts to apply
precedent; others took advantage of the lack of precise guidelines.
During Chief Justice Earl
Warren's tenure (1954–1969), a Court strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties furthered the process commenced in the 1930s and 1940s of applying the Bill of Rights to the states. haAs a result, many state high court holdings, especially those pertaining to the rights of criminal defendants, were overturned.
Justices in virtually all states expressed resentment over what they regarded as the Court's insensitivity to judicial relationships in a federal system and its assumption that state courts lacked the will and capability to protect civil rights. Tensions between state supreme courts and their federal counterpart were further exacerbated by Court holdings that sustained
lower federal court grants of habeas corpus petitions to prisoners seeking to vindicate rights enunciated by the Warren Court and allegedly disregarded by state courts.
Under the leadership of Chief Justices Warren
Burger (1969–1986) and William H.
Rehnquist (1986–), the Court has significantly curtailed the reach of the Warren Court's numerous civil liberties rulings. In response to the Court's retrenchment, a number of state high courts, some more enthusiastically and consistently than others, have relied on state constitutions to extend protections greater than those accorded by the Supreme Court.
Initially, the Court applauded what is referred to as “the new judicial federalism.” Within a few years, however, the Court paid closer attention to the independent and adequate state ground strictures and a number of civil libertarian state court rulings were reversed or remanded to the states for further consideration. Critics have argued that the Court's increasingly stringent approach pertained less to independent and adequate state ground considerations and more to its restrictive view of civil rights and liberties in general and its distaste for civil libertarian judicial activism in particular.
The Burger and Rehnquist Courts have accompanied this retrenchment process with disapproval of lower federal court grants or habeas corpus petitions in search and seizure and death penalty appeals (see
Capital Punishment;
Search Warrant Rules, Exceptions to). Since the Supreme Court hears so few of the appeals coming from state courts, denial of state prisoner access to federal courts results in augmenting the authority of state courts to make final decisions in these areas.
While noncompliance with Supreme Court decisions is the exception rather than the rule, state courts have historically contrived means of distinguishing, limiting, or eroding federal precedent and of evading the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. The Court has the power to exercise its will over all lower state and federal courts, but it must determine how much of its time, its institutional capacities and prestige it is willing to expend in order to assure compliance with its mandates.
In different historical periods and according to different issues, the Court has faced down, mollified, accommodated, and on rare occasions, capitulated to state courts that either defy the Court's direct mandates or fail to observe precedents that enunciate applicable constitutional principles. Examples include the tug‐of‐war between the Virginia judiciary and the Marshall Court over the final determination of federal constitutional questions; the Court's willingness to give state courts more than ample time to follow directives in race relations cases, to clarify ambiguous right to counsel rulings, to overlook or ignore state court manipulation of
self‐incrimination precedent, and by default to permit a state supreme court, after protracted litigation in the highest state and federal courts, to have its way in a capital punishment case that involved complicated procedural questions.
The interaction of the Supreme Court and state courts is complex. It is misleading simply to depict the Supreme Court as prime mover, state courts as responders, and the Supreme Court as the institution that selectively and loftily considers the state responses. The Supreme Court is not the only initiator; it also has been receptive to substantive state court influence.
In the first place, as Justice William
Brennan acknowledged in a 1964 law review article, state high courts have provided the Supreme Court with guidance in deciding federal constitutional questions in areas such as reapportionment, obscenity, freedom of
religion, and defendants' rights. Second, state courts, expanding on recently enunciated Supreme Court principles, have charted the way for further Supreme Court evolution of its new doctrines. The California high court, for example, employing techniques developed by the Supreme Court for deciding Fourteenth Amendment equal protection cases, ruled in
Purdy and Fitzpatrick v. State (1969) that special treatment for aliens constituted impermissible discrimination. In
Graham v. Richardson (1971), the Supreme Court followed suit.
In the third place, the process of state court response to Supreme Court holdings and Supreme Court response to the state court responses has over time produced a “hybrid federal‐state constitutional law” covering a wide spectrum of issues. For instance, in the seven years that followed a Supreme Court holding concerning right to
counsel for indigents at probation revocation hearings, state courts decided hundreds of similar cases. When the Court again reviewed the issue, its ruling took account of state court problems with and objections to the earlier mandate. Similarly, New York's highest court so impressed a Warren Court majority with its
People v. Rivera (1964) that admitted holding evidence obtained from a police
stop and frisk search and seizure, that the Court in
Terry v. Ohio (1968) essentially agreed that such procedures were exempt from what had been its increasingly expansive interpretation of
Fourth Amendment protections.
The Supreme Court is in control of its relations with state courts. But how it chooses to exercise that control is another matter. In some periods, as illustrated by the Warren Court, the Court has come close to adhering to a hierarchical model. In others, as illustrated by pre‐Warren and the Burger and Rehnquist courts, it has allowed state courts considerable leeway. Traditional considerations for state court autonomy may be overridden by the Court's concern for preserving its own precepts, but the Court has been willing to shift authority from federal to state courts in order to reduce substantially what the Court regards as excessive appeals concerning issues that do not elicit the Court's sympathy.
Finally, if past trends portend the future, relations between federal and state supreme courts will continue to fluctuate. No matter how persuasive or consistent state courts may be, the Supreme Court will continue to establish the terms of judicial federalism.
See also
Federalism;
Incorporation Doctrine;
State Constitutions and Individual Rights.
Bibliography
William J. Brennan, Jr. , Some Aspects of Federalism. New York University Law Review 39 (1964): 945–961.
Robert M. Cover and and T. Alexander Aleinikoff , Dialectical Federalism: Habeas Corpus and the Court, Yale Law Journal 86 (1977): 1035–1102.
Stanley H. Friedelbaum, ed., Human Rights in the States (1988), chaps. 1, 2, and 6.
Mary Cornelia Porter and G. Alan Tarr, eds., State Supreme Courts: Policymakers in the Federal System (1982), intro. and chaps. 1, 2, 7, and 8.
G. Alan Tarr and and Mary Cornelia Aldis Porter , State Supreme Courts in State and Nation (1988).
Mary Cornelia Aldis Porter
