Patterns of Policy Making Across State Supreme Courts

In recent years, a number of state supreme courts have explicitly declined to follow decisions of the United States Supreme Court. In a 1998 opinion, ¹ the Supreme Court of Georgia struck down a state law criminalizing sodomy and expressly rejected the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. ² Likewise, several states have rebuffed a major decision of the Court on the free exercise of religion ³ , while a number of its criminal rights rulings have met with outright defiance from state supreme courts. ⁴ In one particularly egregious example, the Connecticut Supreme Court made clear its displeasure with the standard to be used in search and seizure cases established by the Supreme Court in Illinois v. Gates: ⁵

We eschew the amorphous standard of Gates in passing upon article first, § 7, interpretation and apply the more specific standards of the Aguilar-Spinelli test … The Aguilar-Spinelli test, with its two prongs of “veracity” or “reliability” and “basis of knowledge,” offers a practical and independent test under our constitution that predictably guides the conduct of all concerned, including magistrates and law enforcement officials, in the determination of probable cause. ⁶