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From Portland to Minneapolis, aggressive actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents against citizens and noncitizens alike have been well documented. Many of these encounters raise grave constitutional concerns. Yet it may surprise—and alarm—many to learn that there is often no viable path to sue federal officers if they violate your constitutional rights, even egregiously.

State legislatures regularly propose and enact laws that seek to shape the substantive outcomes of state courts. These measures, including court-packing efforts, jurisdiction-stripping laws, and more creative maneuvers to change judicial selection or authority, would amount to legal earthquakes at the federal level. At the state level, these efforts often receive virtually no attention. This Essay brings the potent category of outcome-shaping court reform measures into focus and evaluates it as a question of state constitutional law.

Amid federal upheaval, myriad important legal and policy developments continue to unfold at the state level. The Essays in this Special Issue were presented at, or grew out of, the fifth annual Public Law in the States Conference hosted by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School in May 2025.

Developed by two of the subject’s leading experts, the First Edition of State Constitutional Law: Cases and Principles provides a contemporary, authoritative treatment of the field, complete with majority approaches and alternatives across the country. The book provides detailed treatments of the wide range of state constitutional issues—not only rights, but also government structure, democracy, fiscal provisions, and intrastate relations.

Does the Ohio Constitution allow the General Assembly to override the will of the people? The Essay situates Ohio within the broader national landscape, surveys how other states address legislative overrides of citizen-initiated statutes, and develops an interpretive framework grounded in the Ohio Constitution.

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which has no explicit voting rights guarantee, state constitutions both affirmatively grant the right to vote and list explicit, enumerated exceptions from that right. But state actors routinely overstep those bounds—a practice this article refers to as “disenfranchisement creep.” This article identifies two primary ways in which state actors disenfranchise people beyond the scope of state constitutions.

On Wisconsin’s April 1, 2025, spring election ballot, voters will see a proposed constitutional amendment asking whether to add a voter ID requirement to the state constitution. Wisconsin already has a state statute that requires voters to present an acceptable photo ID in order to vote. By constitutionalizing this requirement, the amendment would, if approved, make it more difficult for a future legislature or court to change course on voter ID. This explainer describes the proposed amendment, lays out the main arguments being made for and against the proposal, and provides national context on voter ID requirements.

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.

A roundup of state public law scholarship published in the fall of 2024.

Recent scholarship persuasively argues that state constitutional law should be grounded in state-centered reasoning, not federal imitation. That approach, compelling at the 10,000-foot level, also requires development through examples closer to the ground. This symposium Article uses legislative vetoes—arrangements in which legislators can override executive action without passing new laws—to explore the practice and adjudication of state structural constitutionalism.