Federal Courts as Monitors: Irreparable Injury in State Courts

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that state and federal courts are equally competent in their ability to decide federal constitutional claims. Indeed, this presumption is essential to Younger v. Harris, in which the Supreme Court held that federal courts may not enjoin state criminal proceedings in the absence of exception circumstances warranting federal relief. Central to this holding is the idea that state courts are as able as federal courts to decide constitutional claims; otherwise, forcing state criminal defendants to present their constitutional claims as defenses would not constitute an adequate remedy at law. Yet the fact that the Court in Younger recognized that there could some set of circumstances that would require federal intervention into state criminal proceedings, as well as lower courts’ use of these exceptions, demonstrates how the federal courts themselves view parity. If federal courts must sometimes interfere with state proceedings, then there must be some federal constitutional issues that the state courts are presumed unable to handle. In these situations, the state and federal courts are not in parity.