Plus: How Skrmetti is rippling through state courts


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When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022’s Dobbs decision, the dissenting justices warned

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that “interjurisdictional abortion wars” were coming. Travel, telemedicine, and other cross-state interactions would raise complex legal questions about which state’s laws govern.

Last week, a New York trial court ruled

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against Texas in an ongoing fight over whether New York must recognize Texas’s legal judgments against New York abortion providers.

Back in 2023, New York passed an abortion shield law. Intended to protect both patients and providers, the law places broad limits on New York state and local officials’ ability to cooperate when other states seek to impose civil or criminal liability for abortion care that was either received or provided in New York.

Notably, that includes telehealth services, such as when a New York provider mails abortion drugs to a patient in a state with an abortion ban. Today, nearly half

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of all states have some form of shield law, and eight states

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, including New York, have explicit telehealth protections. Bolstered by these shield laws, patients in states with abortion bans have widely used

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telehealth abortion services.

Enter Texas. In 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought a civil lawsuit in Texas against a New York doctor, Margaret Carpenter, who had allegedly sent abortion pills to a patient in Texas in violation of Texas law. Carpenter did not respond to the suit, and a Texas judge issued a default judgment against her, ordering that she pay a $100,000 fine plus other costs and interest and issuing an order barring her from providing abortion telemedicine services to Texans.

The big question, however, was whether Texas would be able to enforce its ruling in New York and collect against Carpenter’s assets.

As a general matter, under New York law, anyone seeking to enforce an out-of-state judgment must first go through a legal process in the New York courts to “domesticate” the judgment. Texas sought to begin this process by filing papers with a New York county clerk, Taylor Bruck. But Bruck refused to process the filing, pointing to New York’s shield law.

Texas then filed a state lawsuit against the clerk seeking an order (or for the law nerds among us, a writ of mandamus

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) requiring that Bruck accept Texas’s submission. To the extent that New York’s shield law barred the clerk from doing so, Texas argued that the law ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause. New York “cannot assert that its public policy provides an exception to the full faith and credit due to a Texas state court judgment,” Texan lawyers argued.

Last week, in Texas v. Bruck, New York State Judge David Gandin dismissed Texas’s case. Carpenter’s conduct fell squarely within the shield law’s ambit, the court reasoned. And because the law barred state or local government employees from using any “time, resources, equipment or personnel” in furtherance of a proceeding seeking to impose liability on Carpenter, Bruck was legally barred from processing Texas’s filing.

But it was Texas’s constitutional claim that had the potential to be a legal blockbuster, and there the court punted on procedural grounds. While Texas raised the Full Faith and Credit Clause in its briefing, its petition to the court did not mention any constitutional challenge to New York’s shield law. The court ruled that the constitutional question was therefore “not at issue” in the proceeding.

Even if the court’s procedural ruling allows the New York courts to avoid addressing Texas’s constitutional arguments in Bruck, however, Texas’s Full Faith and Credit arguments will loom over future cases.

In an 1892 case called Huntington v. Attrill

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, the Supreme Court laid out a framework for states’ full faith and credit obligations, explaining that states need not recognize judgments that are “penal” in nature from other states. This applies pretty clearly to criminal penalties, but the Court also indicated that civil laws with a penal purpose would also qualify.

But as UCLA law professor Lindsay Wiley has explained

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in State Court Report, existing precedent for what counts as a penal purpose is slim. Wiley argues that the relevant question should be whether a civil judgment “punishes an individual in the name of protecting public morality and the health and lives of future pregnant patients.” If courts adopt Wiley’s formulation, cases like Carpenter’s would likely fall outside states’ full faith and credit obligations.

Ultimately, it’s a question that’s almost certain to eventually land in the Supreme Court. The interjurisdictional abortion wars are only just beginning.

One more piece of news: On Tuesday, Pennsylvanians voted to retain three justices on their state supreme court. To understand what this result likely means for future cases relating to voting, abortion rights, and much more, check out this explainer

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by my colleague Douglas Keith.





The U.S. Supreme Court’s Trans Health Care Decision Is Rippling Through State Courts

In upholding a state ban on gender-affirming care for trans youths, a North Dakota trial court tracked the reasoning of United States v. Skrmetti, the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a similar ban. “This decision also brings to the surface something that was obscured, but still present, in Skrmetti: . . . the assumption that trans identity is inherently medical,” writes NYU Law School student Morgan Munroe. Read more

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State Courts Weigh In on Public Policies Assisting the Poor

“In an age marked by an extreme lack of affordable housing, rising poverty, and homelessness, state courts have largely upheld state and local governments’ efforts to enact or uphold policies that protect vulnerable communities from these difficult economic realities,” writes Bridget Lavender of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Read more

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The Maryland Constitution, One of the Nation’s Oldest, Was a Model for Other States

“Many current provisions are the same as they were in 1776,” writes Judge Dan Friedman, who serves on the Appellate Court of Maryland, of his state’s constitution. But “recent amendments, including protection for reproductive rights, have aligned with current issues facing citizens of both Maryland and the nation.” Read more

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Voting Rights Case Trends

“After a wave of blockbuster decisions leading up to the 2024 election,” writes the Brennan Center’s Chihiro Isozaki, “state courts this year continued to grapple with fundamental questions about the scope of the right to vote under their constitutions.” Read more

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State Court Oral Arguments to Watch for in November

Issues on the dockets include the indigent defense crises in multiple states, curbing citizens’ initiative power in Oklahoma, voter restrictions in Missouri, school funding in Wyoming, and a voter-approved ban on large-capacity magazines in Oregon, write State Court Report’s Sarah Kessler and the Brennan Center’s Erin Geiger Smith. Read more

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What Else We’re Reading (and Watching)

Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote

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about state courts and legislatures as laboratories for reform and resistance; he also highlighted State Court Report’s symposium

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, which is happening on Thursday and Friday of this week, “The Power of State Constitutional Rights.”





You May Have Missed

Four voters filed a state lawsuit

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alleging that New York’s 2024 congressional map dilutes Black and Latino votes in a district that includes Staten Island and parts of South Brooklyn, violating a 2014 New York constitutional amendment. The suit claims that the state’s 2022 Voting Rights Act informs the scope of the amendment’s vote dilution protections. The challenged district is the only one in New York City with a Republican congressperson. State Court Report previously covered

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state voting rights acts.

The Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously held

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that a blanket ban on transgender women competing in women’s powerlifting events violates a state Human Rights Act prohibition on discrimination in places of public accommodation because it facially discriminates based on transgender status. State Court Report previously discussed

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protections for transgender people since the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision.





Notable Cases

Hicks v. State

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, Wyoming Supreme Court

Unanimously held that while three clauses in the Wyoming Constitution, including its bar on “cruel or unusual punishment,” provide guarantees unique from the federal Eighth Amendment, they do not afford sentencing protections to emerging adults who are 18 or older as a distinct category of criminal offender. The court also held that the defendant’s mandatory life-without-parole sentences do not otherwise violate these clauses, state equal protection, or the Eighth Amendment. // Cowboy State Daily

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In re Judge Jennifer Medley

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, Louisiana Supreme Court

Suspended without pay for 30 days a New Orleans district judge for activities during her election campaign — including false statements that her opponent was a “deadbeat dad” — that the court said violated the state’s code of judicial conduct and were actionable under a state constitutional clause allowing the state supreme court, on recommendation of the state’s judiciary commission, to discipline judges for certain willful, persistent, or felonious conduct. The court denied the judge’s claims that these campaign statements were protected by the First Amendment. // WDSU News

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You can find briefs and opinions from notable state constitutional lawsuits in our State Case Database

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.









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