Jason Mazzone, who teaches constitutional law and legal history at Brooklyn Law, has been looking at the relationship of the Roberts Courts to state courts as part of a larger project in which he is studying how state courts apply federal law.
His data on the Roberts Court, he said, shows it is taking fewer state court cases than its predecessors and reversing them at a higher rate. “I think there is a view among many court watchers that John Roberts is not as committed to federalism as Chief Justice [William] Rehnquist was,” said Mazzone. “The data I’m generating now suggests a different kind of federalism — one in which the Court respects state courts as interpreters of federal constitutional law in a way not true of the Rehnquist Court.”
