State Constitutional Law

State constitutions represent an essential—if often neglected—part of the American constitutional tradition. In 1868, nearly a century before Brown and Loving were decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, South Carolina delegates drafted a new constitution that guaranteed free integrated public schools and legalized interracial marriage. Less than thirty years later, a new convention constitutionalized the state’s recently enacted Black Codes: restricting voting rights only to property-owning men who passed a literacy test and paid a poll tax. In 1993, over two decades before Obergefell, Hawaii’s Supreme Court determined that the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage could violate the state’s equal protection clause. In the years that followed, a majority of states (including Hawaii) amended their constitutions to expressly prohibit legal recognition of same-sex marriage.  


For much of American history, state constitutions—which routinely reject key features of the federal text—were central to how ordinary Americans understood their actual constitutional experience and politics. Due to their elaborate detail, frequent revision, and inclusion of socioeconomic rights, these charters today are sometimes dismissed as “super-legislative” documents rife with overly specific (sometimes dead letter) particularities. But in a moment when the interpreted meaning of the federal constitution is undergoing rapid change, many litigators and legal scholars are turning their attention back to state constitutions and the courts that interpret them. This course will examine the text, structure, and role of the 50 state-level counterparts to our federal constitution. Through careful study of caselaw, legal scholarship, and historical context, we will explore these texts on their own terms: as independent sources of justiciable rights, alternative institutional designs for government structure, and pathways for political reform.