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State law (United States)

In the United States, state law refers to the law of each separate U.S. state.

The fifty states are separate sovereigns,[1] with their own state constitutions, state governments, and state courts. All states have a legislative branch which enacts state statutes, an executive branch that promulgates state regulations pursuant to statutory authorization, and a judicial branch that applies, interprets, and occasionally overturns both state statutes and regulations, as well as local ordinances. States retain plenary power to make laws covering anything not preempted by the federal Constitution, federal statutes, or international treaties ratified by the federal Senate. Normally, state supreme courts are the final interpreters of state institutions and state law, unless their interpretation itself presents a federal issue, in which case a decision may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by way of a petition for writ of certiorari.[2] State laws have dramatically diverged in the centuries since independence, to the extent that the United States cannot be regarded as one legal system (as to the majority of types of law traditionally under state control), but instead as 50 separate systems of tort law, family law, property law, contract law, criminal law, and so on.[3]

Most cases are litigated in state courts and involve claims and defenses under state laws.[4][5] In a 2018 report, the National Center for State Courts' Court Statistics Project found that state trial courts received 83.8 million newly filed cases in 2018, which consisted of 44.4 million traffic cases, 17.0 million criminal cases, 16.4 million civil cases, 4.7 million domestic relations cases, and 1.2 million juvenile cases.[6] In 2018, state appellate courts received 234,000 new cases.[6] By way of comparison, all federal district courts in 2016 together received only about 274,552 new civil cases, 79,787 new criminal cases, and 833,515 bankruptcy cases, while federal appellate courts received 53,649 new cases.[7]

  1. ^ Heath v. Alabama, 474 U.S. 82 (1985). In Heath, the U.S. Supreme Court explained that "the Court has uniformly held that the States are separate sovereigns with respect to the Federal Government because each State's power to prosecute is derived from its own 'inherent sovereignty,' not from the Federal Government .... The States are no less sovereign with respect to each other than they are with respect to the Federal Government. Their powers to undertake criminal prosecutions derive from separate and independent sources of power and authority originally belonging to them before admission to the Union and preserved to them by the Tenth Amendment."
  2. ^ See 28 U.S.C. § 1257.
  3. ^ Olson, Kent C. (1999). Legal Information: How to Find It, How to Use It. Phoenix: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 6. ISBN 0897749634.
  4. ^ Sean O. Hogan, The Judicial Branch of State Government: People, Process, and Politics, (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), xiv.
  5. ^ Alan B. Morisson, "Courts", in Fundamentals of American Law, ed. Alan B. Morisson, 57-60 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60.
  6. ^ a b National Center for State Courts. "State Court Caseload Digest, 2018 Data" (PDF). Court Statistics Project. National Center for State Courts. Retrieved March 18, 2023.
  7. ^ Office of Judges Programs, Statistics Division, Judicial Caseload Indicators (Washington: Administrative Office of the United States Courts, 2016).

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