Introduction

State Grounds and Supreme Court Review

Introduction

A state's highest court decides a case in which federal law plays a part, and the losing party wants the U.S. Supreme Court to look at it again. The route is 28 U.S.C. § 1257, which gives the Court discretionary review, by petition for certiorari, over final judgments of the highest court of a state in which a decision could be had, so long as the case involves a federal question.¹ The statute omits everything else, and the omission follows from a settled premise: state supreme courts are the final authorities on what their own state's law means, and the Supreme Court is bound by their judgments on that subject.² Review of a state judgment therefore reaches only the federal questions in the case. The state-law holdings that sit beside them lie beyond the Court's power to correct.

That limit creates a problem whenever one judgment has two foundations. A state supreme court might hold that a defendant cannot be prosecuted because the state criminal statute does not cover the conduct, and then add that the statute would be invalid under the federal Constitution in any event.³ The Supreme Court cannot disturb the first, state-law conclusion. Even if the Justices disagreed sharply with the constitutional holding and corrected it, the judgment would still stand on the state-law holding, and the defendant would still go free.⁴ A judgment supported in this way is said to rest on an adequate and independent state ground.⁵ The Court declines to review the federal ruling in that situation because its authority over state judgments is an authority to correct judgments that wrongly decide federal rights, and a federal ruling that cannot change the result would amount to an advisory opinion.⁶

This chapter works toward one question: when is the Supreme Court unable to fix a state court's mistake about federal law? It answers in order. The first step is the basic bar and the reasoning behind it. Next, the state ground must satisfy two separate requirements, adequacy first and independence second, and each has its own test. The chapter then turns to the presumption announced in Michigan v. Long, which governs cases where the state court's opinion leaves unclear whether its state ground is truly independent of federal law.⁷ It closes by marking where the doctrine stops applying. The first section below begins with the bar itself and explains why a state ground, once present, keeps the Court from reaching the federal question at all.