This year’s Sumner Canary Memorial Lecture at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
The current year’s Sumner Canary Memorial Lecture at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law was presented by Jeffrey Sutton, who serves as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, speaking on “The Three Faces of American Constitutional Law.”
The talk drew from portions of Judge Sutton’s scholarship and writings that emphasize the importance of state constitutional law and the way those state-level considerations can shape interpretations at the federal constitutional level.
During his address, Judge Sutton also touched on the Supreme Court’s most recent term and its approach to reviewing challenges to policies of the Trump Administration. Bloomberg covered this portion of his remarks:
The record of the Supreme Court on cases involving Donald Trump suggests that the conservative supermajority does not simply align with the Republican president, according to the Sixth Circuit’s retiring chief judge. . . .
Sutton . . . described the court’s last term as “so remarkable” given a president who exercised power that was “fairly aggressive.”
He pointed out that the administration came up short on several occasions before the court. . . .
“It makes me proud to be a lawyer and proud to be a judge,” Sutton stated, because he can “guarantee” that the administration would have prevailed in those lost cases if the issues in question had been referred to a Republican-controlled Congress.
“The insight is, well, whatever these Republican appointees are doing, you can’t call it pure politics, because if it were pure politics, they would behave exactly like the Republican Congress,” the judge asserted.
“There are ongoing judicial actions, even now when we’re skeptical of the Supreme Court, skeptical of federal judges, perhaps skeptical of state judges as well. Yet they are pursuing something that must be seen as distinct from mere party allegiances and electoral calculations,” Sutton added.
As longtime readers may recall, the Canary lecture series has been a fixture of the law school for many years, with this author having spent twenty-five years on the faculty and, for much of that period (2008–2025), coordinating the lectures. It is encouraging to see the tradition endure. Previous Canary lectures are indexed here.
