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As in recent election years, Pennsylvania courts faced a flood of election lawsuits in 2024, with many reaching the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. However, unlike in prior years where the high court readily intervened in election cases, it largely avoided them in 2024. A review of the court’s election cases shows that various procedural and jurisdictional rules limited its ability to resolve several high-profile disputes.

This Article unpacks the state court supervisory power by mapping its sources, applications, and limits. The supervisory power has a basis in all fifty state constitutions and enables supreme courts to oversee their judiciary’s workload and operations. But as this Article shows, high courts are using this power beyond the humdrum of judicial administration to enhance substantive rights and remedies, facilitate their law development and agenda-setting capabilities, and mediate interbranch frictions. This Article’s core claim is that these more expansive applications of the supervisory power are generally defensible based on the evolution of state judiciaries and supreme courts’ unique roles in state governments.

Following the 2024 election, we updated our survey of election-related lawsuits to help understand the role of litigation in our elections. This update underscores key themes from our survey of litigation from 2018 to 2022: litigants continue to file election suits at high rates, primarily in state courts, and most often presenting claims related to election administration and the mechanics of voting.

This Article explores the role of standing doctrine in the future of state-court election litigation. Building on existing state practices and state constitutional principles, we defend a presumptively broad approach to state-court standing in election law cases, which we term simply election standing. We find that most state courts already relax standing to some extent in election cases—an approach that reflects both the flexible power of state courts and state constitutions’ commitment to democracy. State courts may be the best (and only) fora able to resolve pressing election-related disputes, and in turn to foster certainty, finality, and confidence in election outcomes.

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.

"Political groups — some backed by anonymous donors — are launching so many lawsuits over voting rules this year, observers expect that they could approach the record set during the rancorous 2020 election amid Covid and bogus claims of fraud. The Democratic and Republican parties collectively have raised about $41.3 million to spend on such court fights since last year. And nonprofits, including some so-called dark money groups, have likely raised as much as hundreds of millions more."

This Article finds state shadow dockets are more expansive and less transparent than their federal counterpart. In this way, state supreme courts have access to more ways to shape and influence case outcomes with less public scrutiny. I refer to this broader, less transparent form of shadow docket activity as invisible adjudication. This Article develops the concept of invisible adjudication and provides a framework to analyze its various manifestations. Its analysis of the phenomenon highlights the institutional implications for supreme courts.

In recent years, litigation has routinely accompanied elections. To better understand developments in election litigation, we recently completed a survey of election-related lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

For the first time since New York adopted its current judicial appointment process over 40 years ago, the state senate’s Judiciary Committee has rejected a governor’s nominee to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has closed the book on its 2022 sessions and will soon begin hearing cases in 2023. This report considers notable decisions from 2022 and previews key cases coming up in 2023.