State law
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 311 U.S. 223 - West v. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. · 1940Most cited · 3,060 citing opinions
Where an intermediate appellate state court rests its considered judgment upon the rule of law which it announces, that is a datum for ascertaining state law which is not to be disregarded by a federal court unless it is convinced by other persuasive data that the highest court of the state would decide otherwise.
How the Supreme Court has restated “State law”
Each Supreme Court definition of “State law,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “State law”
Court decisions citing the 4 opinions that defined “State law” — 4,015 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 4 definitions, chronological · 1907–1940
- ORIGINAL
Apart from the subordination of the state of Delaware to the Constitution of the United States, there is no doubt that it would have had power to make its statute applicable to this case. ... the bare fact of the parties being outside the territory, in a place belonging to no other sovereign, would not limit the authority of the state, as accepted by civilized theory.
admiralty application
It would be impossible to permit the statutes of Missouri to operate beyond the jurisdiction of that state and in the state of New York, and there destroy freedom of contract without throwing down the constitutional barriers by which all the states are restricted within the orbits of their lawful authority, and upon the preservation of which the government under the Constitution depends. ... The Constitution and its limitations are the safeguards of all the states, preventing any and all of them, under the guise of license or otherwise, from exercising powers not possessed.
extraterritorial reach
A municipal ordinance passed under authority delegated by the legislature is a state law within the meaning of the Federal Constitution; and any enactment, from whatever source originating, to which a state gives the force of law, is a statute of the state.