Judge Sutton on "The Three Faces of American Constitutional Law"

This past Wednesday, Jeffrey Sutton, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, delivered the annual Sumner Canary Memorial Lecture at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law on “The Three Faces of American Constitutional Law.”

The lecture drew upon some of Judge Sutton’s scholarship and writing on the significance of state constitutional law, and how that can influence federal constitutional law.

During his remarks, Judge Sutton also discussed the Supreme Court’s most recent term, and its handling of challenges to Trump Administration policies. This portion of his remarks were covered by Bloomberg:

The US Supreme Court’s record on cases involving Donald Trump shows the conservative supermajority isn’t in lockstep with the Republican president, the Sixth Circuit’s outgoing chief judge said. . . .

Sutton . . . called the court’s last term “so remarkable” in the face of a president exercising a “fairly aggressive” amount of power.

He noted the administration lost several times at the court. . . .

It “makes me proud to be a lawyer and proud to be a judge,” Sutton said, because he can “guarantee” the administration would’ve won the cases it lost if those matters were put to the Republican-controlled Congress.

“The insight is, well, whatever these Republican appointees are doing, you can’t call it pure politics, because if it was pure politics, they would act just like the Republican Congress,” the judge said.

“There’s something judges are doing, even in this moment where we’re skeptical of the Supreme Court, skeptical of federal judges, maybe state judges. They’re still doing something that you have to call different from party and elected politics,” Sutton added.

As longtime readers know, I was a member of the CWRU law faculty for twenty-five years and, during much of that time (2008-2025), I curated the Canary lecture series. It is good to see the tradition continues. Prior Canary lectures are indexed here.

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