State Supreme Court Blitz [Deep Dive #5]

The most important decisions from state supreme courts in December 2024

This article catalogs the ten most important state supreme court decisions from December 2024 along with four other cases that are right below this threshold but deserve attention. It also highlights the winning attorneys and firms in an effort to bring attention to lawyers that are driving success in these courts of last resort. *

* [Note that “state supreme courts” is a bit of a misnomer as there are several courts of last resort like in New York are not known as supreme courts. In New York, for instance, the Supreme Court is a trial court with an appellate division and the court of last resort is the New York Court of Appeals.]

Why focus on state supreme courts?

• State Supreme Courts' Role in Interpreting State Constitutions
  State supreme courts interpret their state constitutions independently, which can result in rulings that create unique legal landscapes on issues like abortion and criminal justice. Their decisions influence both state laws and can shape national debates through state-level precedents.

• Rulemaking Power
  State supreme courts often hold authority over criminal procedure, bail schedules, and sentencing guidelines, directly influencing how laws are applied in practice. This power affects the fairness and efficiency of the judicial system within the state.

• Impact on Civil Rights and Social Justice
  State supreme courts have historically advanced civil rights, particularly when federal courts were less active. Their decisions in areas surrounding civil liberties can provide stronger protections than those guaranteed by federal law.

• Environmental and Regulatory Decisions
  State supreme courts are key in shaping laws related to environmental rights and climate action, with decisions that can either support or hinder state efforts to combat environmental challenges. These rulings have a lasting impact on local and state-level environmental policies.

• Influence on Election Law and Voting Rights
  State supreme courts significantly influence election law, addressing issues like voting accessibility and gerrymandering. Their rulings can determine the fairness of elections, affecting both state and national political landscapes.

State courts are the locus of the majority of litigation in the United States with state supreme courts at the top of the pyramid. The U.S. Supreme Court hears a handful of cases that are not from federal courts of appeals each term but this number makes the likelihood of review of any given case from a state supreme court very low. How low? The U.S. Supreme Court has taken an average of around 16% of its merits docket outside of the federal courts of appeals each term since 2005 which equates to around 11 cases each term (this number has been lower in recent years as the U.S. Supreme Court has taken on fewer cases). Since some cases come from state appeals courts, from federal district courts, and from other federal courts like army appeals, this leaves little room for review of state supreme court decisions. Compound that with the fact that many of the state supreme court decisions deal with constitutional violations in criminal cases (see e.g. Madison v. Alabama) and civil cases from state supreme court are mostly outside of the United States Supreme Court’s purview.

Data

In December 2024 state supreme courts released over 3,000 written opinions or outputs for public consumption. The majority of these were summary in nature. Since state supreme courts often have discretionary jurisdiction, they too do not necessarily need to review each decision appealed or petitioned to them. When decisions under 100 words were removed, 826 decisions from state supreme courts remained for analysis.

Big firms like Skadden, Jones Day, Munger Tolles, and Sullivan & Cromwell litigated pieces of these cases along with more regional state attorneys as is shown below.

Legal Landscape

Here is how the over 800 decisions broke down by respective state supreme court.

Some of the findings from this graph might be surprising. The court with the most output in terms of opinions is the Supreme Court of Montana. The courts of last resort in both California and New York released many fewer opinions than the top producing courts. This is at least somewhat intentional and is an artifact of the procedures for accepting cases at this level.

Amicus briefs were filed in several of the cases as the following distribution of amicus filings (in cases with one or more briefs filed) shows.

Here we see that a larger number of cases have one or two amici than those with more than two amicus briefs. While one case (Held v. State) saw 21 amicus briefs filed, this was the only case with more than 12 amicus briefs filed in it.

Below is a list of cases with amicus briefs filed.

[Note: You need to view this article through a web browser to fully expand the table]

The word count distribution looks as follows:

Most of the state supreme court decisions are short and only offer a cursory analysis of the lower court opinion before ruling. The longer opinions though range quite a bit in length as some justices offer quite expansive views in their decisions. The longer opinions tend to be in more complex cases and oftentimes offer more explanation for the decisions. Many of the longer decisions deal with criminal law-related topics.

Below is a list of decisions with over 10,000 words.