My Brennan Center colleagues Jamie Muth and Chihiro Isozaki recently released a new analysis describing racial, ethnic, gender, and professional diversity in state supreme courts across the country. The numbers reveal a stark disconnect between the composition of many of these powerful bodies and the communities they serve.

In 18 states, high courts don’t have a single justice of color, including in 12 states where people of color make up at least 20 percent of the population. There are no female judges on the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and no women of color on state supreme court benches in 25 states. Eight states have only one female justice.

The report also describes disparities in professional backgrounds. For example, while 39 percent of sitting justices are former prosecutors, only 10 percent are former public defenders.

There are many reasons to care about diversity on the bench, from fostering public trust in the courts to providing role models. But having a broad set of life experiences reflected on the bench can also help judges do a better job of getting things right.

An example that has always stuck with me comes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008–09 term, when there was only a single female justice among its members: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That year, the Court heard a case involving a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched by female school administrators. The girl was forced to strip to her underpants, shake her bra, and pull aside her panties — all based on an accusation by another student that the girl had provided her with prescription-strength ibuprofen.

The oral argument in Safford Unified School District v. Redding didn’t seem to go well for the girl — several justices laughed about locker room antics, and Justice Stephen Breyer expressed skepticism about the harm, asking, “Why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes?”

After the argument, Ginsburg spoke to Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic about the case — and the other justices. “They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” Ginsburg said in the interview. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I don’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

We don’t know exactly what happened behind closed doors, but it seems clear that Ginsburg’s voice made a difference. The Court ultimately agreed that the girl’s rights had been violated; only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. Ginsburg and Justice John Paul Stevens would have gone further to rule that the right at issue was clearly established and that the school officials should not be subject to qualified immunity.

As someone who was also once a 13-year-old girl, I appreciated the Court’s ultimate recognition that the girl had experienced the search as “embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating.” It mattered that Ginsburg had a seat at the table.

Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven C. González made a similar observation about his own court in an interview with State Court Report in 2023. “It’s important to have people making decisions who have a variety of experiences, who may have lived in poverty themselves, who may have experienced life as a person of color or as a gay person and understand what that is like,” he explained.

Among other things, González argued that having these perspectives helps all the justices on the court. “The majority voice changes when I’m in the room as well,” he observed, referencing his background as a Latino man. “It changes the very nature of the discussion. I’m a big fan of that inclusiveness, and I think it makes us better overall.”

“Although a quarter-century has passed since Bush v. Gore, the core issues — the integrity of our elections, the impartiality of our courts, and the significance of the rule of law — are more urgent now than ever,” writes former Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara J. Pariente. Read more

The decision also introduced a fringe idea, the “independent state legislature theory,” that could have robbed state courts of the power to review state laws related to federal elections, explains the Brennan Center’s Eliza Sweren-Becker. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the theory in 2023 in Moore v. Harper. Read more

Three of the five justices on the North Dakota Supreme Court concluded the state’s abortion ban violated state due process rights, but a state rule requires a supermajority to strike down laws, explain Diana Kasdan and Amanda Barrow of UCLA Law’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. That means the dissenting opinion upholding the law — grounded in originalism — controls the outcome. Read more

The decision demonstrates that the distinction between “fundamental” and “non-fundamental” rights doesn’t always make sense in state constitutional jurisprudence, writes the Institute for Justice’s Anthony Sanders. Read more

“A close look at Missouri and Kansas — neighboring states with very different approaches to direct democracy — highlights the increasing importance of the initiative process as a counter to an unresponsive legislature,” writes Stephen R. McAllister, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law who previously served as the state solicitor general and U.S. attorney for Kansas. Read more

Cases considering the constitutionality of bills reviving time-barred civil causes of action for child sexual abuse claims “have showcased judicial federalism in action, with different states applying different tests to interpret different constitutional provisions with different results,” writes Capital University Law School professor Nathaniel M. Fouch. Read more

In a major ruling issued 45 years ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court solidified the state’s constitutional protections for expressional rights as stronger than those guaranteed by the First Amendment, writes Princeton University student Henry Hsiao. Read more

Issues on the dockets include taxpayers’ standing to sue, incarcerated people’s rights to acquire property, and claims that Instagram’s design is addictive, write State Court Report’s Sarah Kessler and the Brennan Center’s Erin Geiger Smith. Read more

Viola Fletcher, who was the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, has died at the age of 111. State Court Report previously covered the case wherein Fletcher and other survivors of the massacre — which killed hundreds of Black Oklahomans and burned a neighborhood to the ground — sought reparations.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court appointed two three-judge panels to hear the pending state constitutional challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional map, one claiming that the map is an improper partisan gerrymander and the other that it’s an “anti-competitive gerrymander.” State Court Report previously wrote about how partisan gerrymandering fights are playing out in state courts, with significant implications for drawing congressional election boundaries.

A New York trial court dismissed challenges by three judges that judicial age limits in the state constitution and statutes violate New York’s Equal Rights Amendment. The Brennan Center has written about how life tenure is a rarity on state supreme courts.

A group of parents are challenging Tennessee’s new school voucher law. The plaintiffs allege that the program violates the state constitution’s education clause in multiple ways, including by funding schools outside the free public school system. State Court Report previously covered legal conflicts over school choice.

Knight v. Fontes, Arizona Supreme Court
Held that the retention election process for intermediate appellate judges, in which voters select only the appellate judges who reside in their geographic area even though the judges have statewide jurisdiction, does not violate the “free and equal” elections clause or the equal privileges and immunities provision. // Arizona Capitol Times

Gatehouse Media Ohio Holdings v. City of Columbus Police Department, Ohio Supreme Court
Held that officers shot at by a suspect they ultimately killed are crime “victims” for purposes of the victim privacy protections in the state’s Marsy’s Law amendment, and that their identities can be redacted without violating any state constitutional right to access public documents. // Ohio Capital Journal

Clarke v. Town of Newburgh, New York Court of Appeals
Unanimously held that the town of Newburgh could not assert its facial state or federal equal protection challenge to the vote dilution provision of the New York Voting Rights Act, based on the state’s long-standing rule that municipalities cannot sue to invalidate state statutes. The court said that a narrow exception to the rule when compliance with legislation would force the municipality to violate a constitutional requirement did not apply. // Times Union

People v. Sargeant, New York Court of Appeals
Unanimously recognized, for the first time in the 342-year history of the right to trial by a 12-person jury in New York, that that right is subject to forfeiture in the “exceedingly rare circumstances” when a defendant engages in “egregious conduct” affecting a juror after deliberations have begun and requiring that juror’s discharge. // The New York Times

You can find briefs and opinions from notable state constitutional lawsuits in our State Case Database.