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Making Constitutional Sense: A Modal Approach To California's Proposition 66, Alan Romero

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

For years, the California Supreme Court has adopted a deferential posture when reviewing state constitutional challenges to a ballot initiative. The decision in Briggs v. Brown underscored the degree to which courts are willing to avoid striking down ballot initiatives on constitutional grounds, such as by broadly construing the initiative’s language to avoid constitutional problems. In construing the language of Proposition 66 to avoid separation of powers problems, however, Briggs effectively re-interpreted central pillars of Proposition 66 in ways rendering it unrecognizable to Californians who cast votes for and against the initiative. Such recasting of ballot initiatives raises fundamental jurisprudential …