Category: 2024

By Hon. Ruth McGregor. Today we mourn the death of Sandra Day O’Connor and gather to share our grief. But today is also a day to celebrate the life of this extraordinary woman. We grieve and celebrate together because we are…

By Hon. Mary M. Schroeder. Sandra Day was raised in the Tenth Circuit and spent her childhood among cowboys on the Lazy B Ranch that straddled Arizona and New Mexico. She rode real horses, not rocking horses, and her first pet…

By Erin Jenkins & Isabella Santos. The Arizona State Law Journal staff was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of former United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on December 1, 2023. We respectfully dedicate this issue of the Arizona…

By Kaitlyn Vance. In 2022, the former governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, placed shipping containers on federal land in an effort to halt migration across the Arizona–Mexico Border. Similarly, in 2023 Governor Greg Abbott of Texas built a buoy barrier in…

By Rosemarie C. McCormack. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dobbs in 2022, Arizona had several conflicting abortion-related statutes and injunctions in place. During this post-Roe uncertainty, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs issued an Executive Order that vested all prosecutions of abortion-related…

By Michael Weingartner.  In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme court rejected the most extreme version of the Independent State Legislature Theory, which would have insulated state election laws from state courts and state constitutions, but left open a path for federal…

By Matthew Slovin. Esteemed Supreme Court correspondents have reported that the Dobbs leak impacted deliberations by locking in the vote count. This Article argues that such "deliberative interference" undermines the legitimacy of the Court's decision. It also proposes strategies for how…

By Kaleigh A. Ruiz. Existing work on gender and the judiciary traditionally finds that women and men on the court decide cases similarly. However, given what we know about women in other American institutions, it's possible that gender differences exist in…

By Paul J. McMurdie, Lexi Carroll, Rebecca Freed, & Eric M. Wilkins. A jury must be fairly representative of its community to effectuate the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. Yet historically, trial attorneys have used peremptory challenges to remove…

By Matthew D. Kim. This Article explores whether elected judges' fear of electoral backlash for countermajoritarian decisions is justified. The results from survey experiments and a dataset of online and social media coverage suggest that voters value principled legal analysis and…