Why State Grounds Bar Review

Why State Grounds Bar Review

The bar begins with a limit on what the Court may review at all. Section 1257 reaches state judgments only where a federal question is involved, and the Court has long treated state supreme courts as the final authorities on what their own state's law means.¹ In Murdock v. City of Memphis the Court held that its power over a state-court judgment extends only to the federal questions that form part or all of the basis for that judgment.² Reviewing state-law rulings is unnecessary to vindicate federal rights or to promote uniform federal law, and doing so would impair each state's power to define its own law; nor does turning away the state issues cause duplicative litigation, since the state court has already adjudicated them.³ The federal question is therefore the only part of a state judgment the Court can touch, and the state-law holdings beside it are fixed points.

Murdock also supplied a corollary. If a state court's judgment rests on an adequate and independent state ground, the Supreme Court should not review the judgment even when the state court misapprehended federal law, because overturning the federal ruling would have no effect on the result.⁴ In Murdock's own opinion the sequence of inquiry ran backward: the Court first asked whether the state court had decided the federal question correctly and only afterward asked whether a state ground would have sustained the judgment anyway, so it risked announcing federal law that changed nothing.⁵ Later decisions inverted the order. Today the Court asks about the state ground first and dismisses for lack of jurisdiction when the ground qualifies.⁶

That inversion produces a single working question about the posture of the case on appeal: if the Court reversed on the federal ground, could the judgment below still stand?⁷ If it could, because a state-law determination that the Court has no power to review would still support the result, the federal ruling cannot affect the outcome and the Court declines to hear it. If it could not, the federal question is properly before the Court. The question is best run from the petitioner's side of the case.

Step three does the real work, and the caution in step two matters: a ground that merely appears to support the result must still be tested, which is the business of the next two sections.

Murdock itself shows the answer that permits review. The dispute was whether a federal conveyance of land to Memphis carried a trust for the descendants of the original grantor, and the state court had rejected the trust claim.⁸ A reversal on that federal point would have produced a judgment for Murdock, so the Court had jurisdiction, reached the federal question, and rejected the claim.⁹

A decided case shows the same pattern. In Jankovich v. Indiana Toll Road Commission the Indiana Supreme Court held that an airport zoning ordinance limiting structure heights on adjacent land took private property without compensation under both the state and federal constitutions, relying explicitly on Indiana law that treated usable air space as part of the property. The Court dismissed certiorari as improvidently granted, because a ruling that the ordinance was valid under the federal Constitution would not have changed the result; the ordinance would remain invalid under the state constitution.¹¹

The reason the Court stops at that point is that its power over state judgments is limited in a particular way. In Justice Jackson's words in Herb v. Pitcairn, the Court's "only power over state judgments is to correct them to the extent that they incorrectly adjudge federal rights."¹² A judgment is what fixes the rights and duties of the parties, while an opinion is the reasoning offered in support of it. When a state ground independently supports the judgment, correcting the state court's federal reasoning would leave the same judgment in place, and the Court would be doing no more than issuing an opinion about federal law that binds no one in the case. Article III limits the judicial power to actual cases and controversies, so a ruling that cannot alter the parties' position is an advisory opinion.¹³ A second reason supports the first: the state court is the final authority on its own law, so the Court has no means of disturbing the state-law ground that keeps the judgment standing.¹⁴ The Court has been uncertain whether the doctrine is a prudential limit on its docket or a constitutional one, and the precise label is debatable, yet the bar is settled and, once it applies, shields the state judgment however mistaken the federal reasoning.¹⁵

A state ground can sit beside a federal question in two common ways. A state court may issue alternative holdings, ruling that a law violates the state constitution and also, independently, the U.S. Constitution; because the Court cannot reverse a ruling resting on the state constitution, no federal ruling could change the outcome.¹⁶ Or the state court may decide the case on state law alone even though a federal ground was available, in which case there is no federal ruling to correct and the same logic applies.¹⁷

The reasoning also marks where the bar ends. Students lose points when they treat a possible state ground as enough, but a ground that the state court could have relied on does not bar review where the state court in fact rested its decision solely on the federal Constitution, as Oregon v. Guzek reaffirmed.¹⁸ Similarly, when a state court upholds its law under both the state and federal constitutions, a Supreme Court holding that the law violates the federal Constitution requires reversal, because a state ground that cannot survive federal law cannot sustain the judgment.¹⁹ The mere presence of a state-law holding therefore does not trigger the bar. The ground must actually support the result and must be one the Court cannot unsettle by correcting the federal ruling, and these two qualities are the adequacy and independence requirements that the next two sections take up in turn.