Dear John,

We are thrilled to introduce you to our team’s new Director of State Courts, LaTisha “Tish” Gotell Faulks! Tish is an attorney, advocate, and educator who has quickly become an indispensable part of the State Courts team and AFJ Action.

Tish was previously the first Black legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, where she and her team worked to provide public education, legal advocacy, thought leadership, and collaborative capacity building to the people of Alabama. While there, Tish negotiated innovative and effective policies to encourage voter turnout during the 2020 election cycle and spearheaded the development of the ACLU of Alabama’s voter protection program to address the needs of hundreds of Alabama voters seeking assistance during the 2020 and 2022 primary and general election cycles. Tish and her team also challenged ongoing efforts to undermine the Voting Rights Act in Alabama, ultimately securing the implementation of remedial congressional district maps that established a second majority-minority congressional district.

Prior to her time at the ACLU of Alabama, Tish taught constitutional law, including courses on separation of powers and civil rights and liberties, at opportunity law schools in Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. She also worked for several years in complex commercial litigation after serving as an elbow law clerk for the Honorable Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey and as a term staff attorney in the Office of Staff Counsel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She is a graduate of the “People’s Electric Law School” at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey, and Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina. We are delighted to welcome Tish to AFJ Action!

Our team is also excited to share the 2025 edition of our annual report cataloging state supreme courts in every state that saw changes to their highest bench in the previous year. State of Justice: State Supreme Courts and the Future of Democracy examines the impact of elections and vacancies in 2024 on state supreme courts nationwide. As federal courts continually erode the protection of human rights, states are increasingly positioned to become havens where these rights are preserved, and state supreme courts are playing an ever more significant role in determining which rights are afforded to the residents of their states. You can check out the report here!

ETHICS UPDATE

The dispute between Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Karen Baker and Marty Sullivan, the director of the administrative office of the courts, is still ongoing and may soon be at the state supreme court. Read more about the judicial conduct scandal that has been plaguing this court since the 2024 election here.

VACANCIES AND ELECTIONS
Justices are set to retire from the high courts in New Hampshire, Vermont, and West Virginia, setting up appointment opportunities in each state, and Virginia’s general assembly has chosen the judge who will join its high court when the chief justice retires next year. Heading into retention elections for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this fall, a new spending record has been set in the recent, high-profile election for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A seat will open on the Montana Supreme Court following a longtime justice’s announcement that she won’t seek reelection, and a Louisiana tax attorney has ascended to the state’s highest court after he was the only person to file for a special election to fill a vacancy on that court. Learn everything you need to know about our vacancies and elections updates here!

LOOKING AHEAD

CASES IN THE COURTS

High courts released important decisions relating to criminal justice in Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska; workers’ rights in Iowa, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, and South Dakota; and digital privacy in Nevada and New Hampshire. Elsewhere, high courts issued opinions impacting civil liberties, consumer protections, digital privacy, environmental protections, firearm protections, legislative redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, property rights, and qualified immunity. Read these important rulings from state supreme courts around the nation here. 

KEEP YOUR EYES ON

In the coming months, the Arizona Supreme Court will consider a dispute to change how appeals judges in the state are elected; the Maine Supreme Judicial Court will consider the state’s plan to address case backlog due to an ongoing lack of indigent counsel; and the New Jersey Supreme Court will consider whether the attorney general’s effort to place a local police department under external oversight violated the state constitution’s home rule provision. Other courts will consider land-use disputes, parental rights, sentencing standards, pollution exclusions for large corporations, religious exemptions to vaccine mandates, the legality of warrantless searches and prohibitions on no-knock warrants, the constitutionality of bans on abortion and weapons in public places, and many others. Learn about the latest news on all things state supreme courts here!

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