In his new book 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press), Sutton tells the untold story of the role that state courts and state constitutions have played through the years. He begins by noting that for the public and the legal community alike, all discussions of constitutional law typically begin and end with the Supreme Court of the United States. So too for litigators, he says: groups pressing new claims for constitutional rights file suits in federal courts, hardly ever in state courts.
Sutton acknowledges that state courts have a generally deserved reputation for "relative underprotection of individual rights." But he notes that the rights now enshrined in the Bill of Rights originated in the state constitutions written between independence in 1776 and the ratification of the national Constitution in 1789. In addition, Sutton notes that at least seven state courts had assumed that power before the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787.
The modern history of constitutional law begins with the Warren Court's revolution in criminal procedure. The Court's series of decisions in the 1960s, such as Mapp, Gideon, and Miranda, required state criminal justice systems and courts to respect rather than ignore the rights specified in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights.
Sutton tells different stories from different periods in U.S. history. The National Court — his term for the one in Washington — has not always been a vanguard for individual rights. To the contrary, the Supreme Court at times has been either blind or slow in protecting individual rights or promoting equal justice. State courts have sometimes been better, sometimes not, but Sutton recites the twentieth century history of four legal issues where state courts helped provide a measure of justice after the Supreme Court's misdirection or default.
In two of these stories, states got the issue right after the Supreme Court got it egregiously wrong. The first begins with the eugenics movement, the pseudoscientific theory for genetic superiority advanced by such progressives as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson early in the twentieth century. To his everlasting embarrassment, the great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put his stamp of approval on the movement in the infamous decision, Buck v. Bell (1927), that upheld a Virginia law for involuntary sterilization of "feeble-minded" individuals.
State legislatures more than state courts get credit for ending involuntary sterilizations by the 1980s, after more than 60,000 such procedures nationwide, according to Sutton's account. State legislatures repealed the sterilization laws and for good measure began writing the precursors of the federal law prohibiting discrimination against the disabled.
The Supreme Court was again egregiously wrong in 1940 when it upheld a West Virginia law requiring public school students to salute the American flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Court's decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940) is a black mark on the reputation of the great Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who flaunted his patriotism in rejecting the religious freedom plea by the Gobitas family, devout believers as Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Court corrected itself in the second of the Flag Salute Cases only three years later by upholding a similar religious freedom claim by Jehovah's Witnesses in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). That story is told in constitutional law classes in law schools, but Sutton adds to the familiar account by noting that state courts had started to rule for Jehovah's Witnesses in such cases in the three-year interim.
In the third of Sutton's stories, the Supreme Court blinked when urged in Wolf v. Colorado (1949) to enforce the Fourth Amendment by requiring states to exclude illegally obtained evidence. At the time, 16 states had their own exclusionary rules. The Court reversed itself in Mapp v. Ohio (1961); by then, nearly half the states had exclusionary rules.
In the last of the stories, Sutton notes the Court's decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) that found no Equal Protection Clause requirement for equal school funding. In the decades since, state courts have moved in: ordering or catalyzing significant reforms to narrow funding disparities between rich school districts and the others.
With his title, Sutton confounds the purpose listed in the Preamble to the Constitution: "to form a more perfect union." Better, he says, to have 51 imperfect solutions from state courts than one imperfect solution for the whole country from the National Court. The Supreme Court, he suggests, should stay its hand unless constitutional text and history are clear. State courts, he says, should be free to adapt individual rights to each state's particular history, culture, and geography.
Sutton refuses to take sides on specific issues. So he does not offer to give up the Heller decision on the Second Amendment and leave gun rights up to individual states. On same-sex marriage, however, he views the interplay between state and federal courts as pointing, perhaps, to the right answer — despite his contrary position in the cases that actually reached the Supreme Court under the title Obergefell v. Hodges.
Sutton emphasizes the role that Massachusetts' highest court played with its decision in Goodridge v. Dep't of Public Health (2003) to recognize marriage equality for same-sex couples under the Bay State's constitution. Without Goodridge, he says, there would have been no Obergefell. For rights advocates, Sutton suggests, look to the states: sage advice surely for those on the political and legal left as the Court prepares, it seems, to take a sharp turn to the right.
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