Court Opinion

ID: 9505392
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 20:04:15.908382+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:04:25.519098
License: Public Domain

SHEPARD, Chief Justice,
concurring.
I join fully in the Court’s opinion, and write separately to address a point ably lifted up by the lawyers for Common Cause of Indiana and the Brennan Center for Justice.
The device of certifying questions of state law that are central to a case being litigated in federal court is productive for state and federal tribunals alike. Knowing that our federal colleagues do not make these referrals casually, we have accepted every certification from our District Courts and the Seventh Circuit, as best I can recall. I expect that we will continue to do so.
Still, the mechanism has its limitations. As amici point out, the questions necessarily come in rather abstract form. We answer a question of law, rather than resolve a case. And, of course, facts matter a great deal in the work judges customarily perform.
Here, for example, the statute in question looks very different when one contemplates a lone pamphleteer, some latter-day Thomas Paine, than it does as applied to a regular party candidate.
This problem of abstraction is especially troublesome when the question at hand is, say, one of state constitutional law, or, as today, a statutory question with palpable constitutional implications. On such occasions, it seems to me, we state judges must be especially mindful of the jurisprudential rules we would employ if the full case were pending for resolution in state court—like avoidance of avoidable constitutional declarations.
We have brushed up against such considerations in the present case, but the language and statutory framework of the law under examination have so strongly suggested an answer that fancier footwork has been unnecessary.
DICKSON, J., joins.