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Taking it to the states: Expansions of civil liberties protections under state constitutional law, 1994
Abstract
While the Warren Court's expansion of selective incorporation made individual rights more uniform across the country, the coming of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts has meant that more responsibility has shifted to the state high courts to determine the bounds of civil liberties protections within their own states. This dissertation explores factors lying behind the development of state constitutional civil liberties. My primary goal is to uncover factors encouraging state high courts to construe state constitutional liberties protections more expansively from the rights provided under federal constitutional law. I draw from literature on judicial behavior and public policy to develop hypotheses indicating that three types of factors (legal, institutional, and environmental) influence state civil liberties development. I test my hypotheses by examining the state high court decisions discussing state constitutional civil liberties issues handed down in 1994. Bivariate analyses suggest the absence of federal Supreme Court precedents from which state courts can draw encourages state courts to create liberal case outcomes. Further, granting state justices longer terms encourages the rejection of federal doctrines both overall and when non-criminal cases are considered. But in criminal cases alone and when considering criminal and non-criminal cases together, judges are more likely to expand civil liberties doctrines when they do face voters rather than state legislators or governors for their continued employment. Also, when only criminal cases are at issue, cases from poorer states are the most likely to develop expansive standards. The unusual results based on the separate considerations of criminal and non-criminal cases indicates that this legal variable has at least an indirect impact on this federal doctrine rejections. While the results of this dissertation are mixed, the study provides some support for the notion that at least some legal, institutional, and environmental variables influence state court decisions to follow federal individual rights doctrines, an aspect of judicial behavior still largely ignored in judicial research.
Subject Area
Political science|Law
Recommended Citation
Beavers, Staci Lynn, "Taking it to the states: Expansions of civil liberties protections under state constitutional law, 1994" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9700074.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9700074