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Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Courts - Do state courts flout Supreme Court precedent?

An article in the March 2008 issue of Cornell Law Review, authored by Frederic M. Bloom, Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University, and titled "State Courts Unbound", begins:

State courts live by simple rules. One rule holds that state courts may adjudicate federal questions—or most of them, at least. Another rule permits state courts to play a pivotal role in the “elaboration of federal constitutional principles.” But still another rule says that state courts may not reject binding Supreme Court precedent—or so we tend to think.

There are good reasons to believe this third rule still holds true. Venerable doctrine, long-enforced court hierarchies, and deepseated fears of jurisprudential “chaos” all teach a now-familiar lesson: state courts must abide Supreme Court doctrine on questions of federal law. This is a brute fact of adjudication, a now-standard legal refrain.

But like any refrain too many times repeated, this one has grown a bit stale. So confident are we that state courts will not disregard Supreme Court doctrine that we scarcely notice when and why they actually do.

And state courts do flout Supreme Court precedent. In fact, state courts have done so very recently and very insistently, nowhere more clearly than in cases highlighting the Court’s recent docket—like Lockyer v. Andrade, Roper v. Simmons, and Smith v. Texas.

Thanks to How Appealing for the link.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 1, 2008 03:16 PM
Posted to Courts in general