Jill Cowan, the New York Times’s California Today correspondent, interviewed Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky about the state’s relationship with the U.S. Supreme Court as currently constituted.
One of Chemerinsky’s predictions is that there will be “a lot more civil rights litigation choosing to go to state court and use state law, rather than going to federal court, given how conservative the Supreme Court is and how much more liberal the California Supreme Court is.”
He said this isn’t new: “We saw that with regard to marriage equality — the initial cases for gay and lesbian marriage all were in state court under state law.” (See here.) Going forward, he said the preference for California state courts might manifest in excessive force actions against police officers and “certainly anything with regard to the right to education.”
Related: