Law Commons^™

Distrust Of Democracy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The current rediscovery of state constitutions has had a singular and curious feature: it has been focused largely on state constitutional provisions that are analogous, if not identical, to provisions of the United States Constitution. Scholars and jurists have devoted their attention to state protections of speech, state equal protection clauses, state privileges against self-incrimination, and state proscriptions of cruel and unusual punishments, and have developed interpretations of these texts that diverge from those adopted by the United States Supreme Court in construing comparable federal constitutional provisions. These attempts to play state variations on federal constitutional themes have not been …