What the SCOTUS Term Means for State Courts

Federal law constrains state power, but it also leaves openings (sometimes chasms) for state constitutions and state laws to fill. One of the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court terms in recent memory just ended, and it changed that landscape in significant ways. I thought I’d use this week’s essay to talk about some of the implications for state courts and constitutions.

Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case, was the headline of the term. It shocked many observers, myself included, with its broad grant of presidential immunity for “official acts,” coupled with ambiguous exceptions that lower courts will be left to puzzle over. While the case before the Court was a federal criminal prosecution, the state court sentencing for Donald Trump’s recent conviction under New York law has since been postponed to give the trial judge time to consider the implications of the ruling. 

Importantly, the New York trial related to Trump’s campaign and business conduct, not “official acts” as defined by the Supreme Court. The New York court’s analysis will likely turn on whether any of the evidence presented at the trial did encompass official acts (and if so, whether doctrines like waiver or harmless error may apply). In the end, the immunity ruling will create a federal appellate issue that could ultimately lead to Supreme Court review of Trump’s New York conviction, but not until the case passes through New York’s own appellate process. 

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court upheld a municipality’s anti-camping law that made it illegal for unhoused residents to sleep outdoors, rejecting a challenge under the Eighth Amendment. Here the Court created a rights vacuum that state courts could potentially fill under their state constitutions. A New York City consent decree, for example, has long recognized a right to shelter rooted in a state constitutional provision providing that the state shall provide “aid, care and support of the needy” (although a recent settlement scaled back its scope). And the Hawaii Supreme Court recently held that state due process requires a hearing before the state can seize and destroy property during government sweeps of encampments. With respect to the Eighth Amendment, in other contexts we’ve seen some courts interpret analogous state constitutional provisions more expansively. Many states’ constitutions also have broad natural rights language recognizing “inherent” or “inalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Might there be a fundamental right to sleep?

The Supreme Court also punted on an abortion rights case coming out of Idaho, Moyle v. United States, which raised the question of whether federal law requires Medicare-funded hospitals to provide emergency abortions. The Court dismissed the appeal and didn’t weigh in on the merits but did reinstate a lower court injunction requiring Idaho doctors to provide emergency abortions while litigation continues. 

As a practical matter, the (non)ruling creates a rights patchwork, at least for now, because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in a different case coming out of Texas that the federal statute at issue does not apply to emergency abortions. As the Brennan Center’s Gabriella Sanchez recently explained, all this legal uncertainty means that litigation under state constitutions aimed at clarifying or broadening life or health exceptions to abortion bans will almost certainly continue, with mixed results.

Another decision with major implications for state courts is United States v. Rahimi, in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal law banning gun possession by people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. Rahimi rolled back some of the most extreme implications of the Court’s 2022 Second Amendment decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. As law professor Eric Ruben explained in a recent piece, this leaves more space for state courts to issue disarmament orders — but also a lot of open questions about what kind of orders pass constitutional muster and what kind of procedural steps are required. A point that Ruben makes that I had never realized: most Second Amendment litigation actually happens in state court.

Finally, some rulings are worth watching even if they don’t implicate state courts directly. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which required courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretation of ambiguous federal statutes. Deference has also been the norm in the states: 35 states provide for substantial or appreciable deference to state agency action. Loper Bright is based on an interpretation of federal legislation, the Administrative Procedure Act — meaning that there’s no legal reason why it should implicate state agencies at all. One big question will be whether this federal law decision nevertheless exerts a gravitational pull on how state courts interact with state agencies.

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