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Legislative Responses to Unconstitutionality: A View from the States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Matthew H. Bosworth
Matthew H. Bosworth*
Affiliation:
Winona State University
*
Contact the author at mbosworth@winona.edu.
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Abstract

This article contributes to literature on legislative-court relations by incorporating the states. Pickerill (2004) examined congressional responses to court rulings declaring statutes unconstitutional, classifying responses into three categories—amending, repealing, or doing nothing. I assembled a list of all Minnesota, Michigan, and Wyoming statutes declared unconstitutional from 1940 to 2008 by state or federal courts. I then determined the legislature’s response. I find unexpected differences in state responsiveness, and between the states and Congress. Also, state legislatures are more likely to respond to a ruling of unconstitutionality from their own courts than from the federal courts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Fall 2017 , pp. 243 - 266
Copyright
© 2017 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

Note: The author wishes to thank, in no particular order, J. Mitchell Pickerill, Michael Gauger, John Dinan, Jeff Yates, Christopher Shortell, JLC editor David Klein, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments on this article. Data are available at the JLC Dataverse (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WZB1EN). If using the data, please cite this article.

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