Search
Filter Search
Bryna Godar
Bryna Godar is a staff attorney for the State Democracy Research Initiative at University of Wisconsin Law School.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down Legislative Vetoes
The case marks a major shift in how Wisconsin’s government functions.
American Indians and Indigenous Peoples in State Constitutions
In the shadow of federal law, some state constitutions address American Indian land, taxation, gaming permissions, voting rights, cultural protection, and governance.
Recent State Judicial Opinions Critique Lockstepping
Justices in Connecticut, Texas, and Pennsylvania have called on their courts to embrace independent state constitutional interpretations.
Dupuis v. Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland
Held that a law that revived claims based on sex acts toward minors that were previously time-barred impairs a defendant's vested right to be free from a claim once its statute of limitations has expired, finding that a prohibition on laws reviving expired claims "runs as a theme" throughout the text of Maine's Constitution.
State v. Francisco Edgar Tirado
Held that North Carolina's "cruel or unusual" punishment clause — construed consistently with a separate state constitutional provision specifying the types of punishment laws may impose, without limitations based on age — would provide less protection against life-without-parole sentences for juveniles than the Eighth Amendment, so must be interpreted in lockstep with the federal "cruel and unusual" punishment clause.
LeMieux v. Evers
The Wisconsin Supreme Court held, in a divided decision, that the governor did not exceed his partial veto authority under the state constitution when he altered digits, words, and punctuation in a budget bill to extend a school funding increase from 2 to 402 years.
Cherokee Nation v. U.S. Department of the Interior
Held that the governor possesses constitutional and statutory authority to represent the state’s interests in litigation involving tribal gaming contracts, including to choose the counsel who will represent his position. The governor was a named defendant in his official capacity in the underlying litigation, and the state attorney general sought to assume control of defending the state’s interests over the objection of the governor, who had already employed separate counsel to represent the state.
Gotay v. Creen
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that a “special relationship” exists between foster children and the state that imposes an affirmative duty on the state to ensure a reasonably safe foster home environment, but found the state defendants were entitled to qualified immunity on the parent and guardian's substantive due process claim.
Texas v. Margaret Daley Carpenter
Texas’s attorney general sued a New York doctor for mailing abortion-including drugs to a woman in Texas, claiming she practiced medicine in Texas without a Texas license and improperly aided an abortion. After the doctor did not respond to the complaint, a Texas trial court issued a default judgment enjoining her from prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to state residents and imposing $100,000 in civil penalties, as sought by the attorney general.
