Recent State Judicial Opinions Suggest Shift Away from Lockstepping 

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State constitutional provisions often have analogues in the U.S. Constitution. Many state courts have outsourced interpretation of these provisions by lockstepping with federal courts. But there are signs that momentum is shifting. In recent cases in Connecticut, Texas, and Pennsylvania, justices have called on their courts to embrace independent state constitutional interpretations. The cases — which span the ideological spectrum — highlight both the breadth of issues that state constitutions address and the obstacles to realizing a more robust state constitutional law.

One example is State v. Haynes, in which the Connecticut Supreme Court allowed prosecutors to use statements obtained in violation of a defendant’s Miranda rights in order to show contradictions in his testimony. (This is known as impeachment evidence.) In a 5–1 ruling, the court rejected a call to reconsider its existing precedent — adopted in a single-sentence footnote — which accepted the U.S. Supreme Court’s rule on admissibility. 

The ruling prompted a lengthy dissent from Justice Steven Ecker, who argued for a more “nuanced” approach to impeachment evidence. The majority and dissent had sharp differences about the policy issues at play, but what struck me was the extent to which the court’s earlier ruling created a path dependence. The majority explained that under principles of stare decisis (i.e., respect for precedent), there must be “inescapable” reasons to revisit a prior ruling. This led, as Ecker noted, to an analysis that was more “perfunctory” than the court would have put forth had it been considering the issue in the first instance. 

Given how often courts have defaulted to interpreting state provisions in lockstep with the federal Constitution, stare decisis is a regular challenge for litigants and judges seeking to chart a more independent path. It’s worth considering whether different principles should apply in these circumstances. Indeed, the Ohio Supreme Court recently announced that in instances wherein it had previously adopted a federal approach without any analysis, “it is appropriate to revisit unreasoned prior precedent.”

Another set of challenges came up in a recent Texas Supreme Court ruling, Southern Methodist University v. South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church. In this case, the court ruled on statutory grounds that the Methodist Conference had the right to sue the university for breach of contract. In a concurrence, four justices highlighted that the court has never determined the extent to which the Texas Constitution protects the autonomy of religious organizations, despite the fact that the state constitution’s language is different — and seemingly broader — than the First Amendment.

The justices argued that there was a key reason why the court had never analyzed this state constitutional issue: In this and other cases, litigants “have proceeded as though federal law and state law are identical in their potential to protect the Conference’s religious autonomy from interference.” It’s a concern I’ve heard from many judges — state constitutional claims often aren’t raised or argued independently in the briefs submitted to courts, which makes it both procedurally and practically difficult for judges to develop potential state constitutional arguments. In their concurrence, the Texas justices explicitly invited amici, the bar, the public, litigating parties, and lower-court judges to help map the “distinct contours” of Texas’s religious protections. 

I’ll end with a case from Pennsylvania, Ferguson v. Department of Transportation. It doesn’t quite fit the same pattern as the other two, but it raises a point I find really interesting. In this case, a person facing a driver’s license suspension after a DUI conviction brought a substantive due process claim — a protection against “arbitrary and unjust legislation” — challenging the suspension under the Pennsylvania Constitution. The court ultimately rejected the claim but, in considering the state constitutional argument, applied state precedent to use a more rigorous standard of review than what is applied under the federal Constitution. 

In a concurrence, Justice David Wecht argued against the heightened standard of review, based on his own independent review of the state constitution. Thus, the debate was not over whether the Pennsylvania Constitution should be interpreted independently, but how. Wecht pointed out that the Pennsylvania Constitution doesn’t actually have a due process clause. The state’s protections against unjust or arbitrary laws are instead rooted in two other provisions: a guarantee of certain “inherent and indefeasible rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (a version of which appears in numerous state constitutions), and a provision guaranteeing a “remedy by due course of law.” 

Wecht suggested that by using a federal constitutional principle like substantive due process as a framework, the court is ultimately treating the state constitution as little more than “a weak, me-too sidekick” to the U.S. Constitution. His argument points to the gravitational pull that federal legal concepts like substantive due process place on state law, even when state constitutional texts are different and courts are evaluating state constitutional claims independently. I’ll be watching to see if debates over this kind of conceptual lockstepping becomes more common as state courts engage more deeply in state constitutional interpretation.

Alicia Bannon is editor in chief for State Court Report. She is also director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Suggested Citation: Alicia Bannon, State Courts Decide Whether or Not to Lockstep, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Aug. 4, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/state-courts-decide-whether-or-not-lockstep