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Decisions in California, Michigan, and Utah could serve as models for courts in other states facing power struggles between legislatures and proponents of voter-approved ballot initiatives.

The Michigan Supreme Court finished its 2023-2024 term in July, wrapping up a year in which the court decided several cases that will likely leave lasting impacts on democracy in the state. This report recaps the Michigan Supreme Court’s major democracy decisions from its 2023-2024 term, which ran from August 1, 2023 to July 31, 2024. It begins with an overview of the term before discussing the major democracy-related decisions. It then previews significant democracy cases that are currently working their way through Michigan’s court system and could soon be decided by the Michigan Supreme Court.

In roughly half of U.S. states, state constitutions confer rights of direct democracy, allowing the people to make law directly through statutes or constitutional amendments. The exercise of direct democracy rights can lead to power struggles with state legislatures. In particular, state legislatures sometimes respond to successful ballot measures by passing new laws that make ballot measures harder to use. Disputes over these new burdens on direct democracy frequently land in state courts. This Report considers how state courts have responded to these power struggles, with special attention to case law analyzing process-altering legislation under state constitutional direct democracy rights.

"Michigan progressives gathered enough signatures in 2018 to put two labor measures on the ballot: one to raise the minimum wage, another to mandate paid sick time for employees. Republican lawmakers, who ran the state at that time, thwarted the proposals with a brazen two-step maneuver. Before the measures were put before voters, they adopted legislation that enacted both into law exactly as organizers had drafted them; this eliminated them from the ballot. But once Election Day passed, lawmakers reconvened and gutted the laws they had just passed, all but erasing organizers’ work."

The Michigan Supreme Court held that the Michigan Legislature violated the state constitution when it used a hardball tactic known as “adopt and amend” to thwart two citizen-proposed initiated statutes in 2018. The case is Mothering Justice v. Attorney General. Its most immediate effect is that the thwarted initiatives—one increases the state’s minimum wage and the other provides some guarantees for workers to earn paid sick leave—will take effect in February 2025. In the long term, the case could help safeguard direct democracy rights in Michigan and around the country.

This report analyzes an often-overlooked set of state entities that hold substantial power: judicial conduct commissions. These entities, which exist in every state, are primarily designed to protect the public from judicial misconduct and have broad authority to investigate and sanction state judges. As state courts gain increasing attention, the public and scholars should likewise attend to the entities that oversee them.

"As President Joe Biden and Donald Trump step up their campaigning in swing states, a quieter battle is taking place in the shadows of their White House rematch. The Republican National Committee, newly reconstituted under Trump, has filed election-related lawsuits in nearly half the states. Recent lawsuits over voter roll maintenance in Michigan and Nevada are part of a larger strategy targeting various aspects of voting and election administration."

In recent years, legal commentators have analyzed—and often criticized—the U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” To date, this dialogue has focused on the U.S. Supreme Court. But the real engines of the American legal system are state, not federal, courts. This paper offers a primer on shadow dockets in the states. ts core observation is that state supreme court shadow dockets are broader and less transparent versions of the federal model—shadow shadow dockets.

Every 10 years, following the federal census, states are required to redraw their congressional and legislative district maps. In the majority of states, the duty to redistrict rests with the state legislature. Because line-drawing decisions can have significant electoral consequences, the redistricting process is often highly contentious. An especially prominent concern is with partisan gerrymandering—that is, the adoption of maps that unduly advantage one political party over another. This report assesses the rise of state court litigation as one important tool for curbing partisan gerrymandering and provides a state-by-state analysis of the viability of state partisan gerrymandering claims.

The U.S. constitution is quite difficult to change — however, state constitutions are relatively easy…to the extent that 70 state constitution amendments were passed in 2022. Emily Lau, Staff Attorney fort he University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative talks about these “living” documents and the efforts that this non-partisan group is making to make the fifty state constitutions available, and searchable at 50constitutions.org