The movement to dismantle mass incarceration is not a new one. As far back as the 1980’s, when the prison population first started to balloon, there have been efforts to fight back against extremely long prison sentences that are a major driver of widespread mass incarceration. More recently, though, there have been efforts to “pull new levers” in the fight against excessive criminal punishment. One of those levers – and the focus of the State Law Research Initiative’s work – is state courts and constitutions.

The mission of the State Law Research Initiative (SLRI) is to shape and strengthen state constitutional law to support individual rights against excessive punishments, with an emphasis on excessive prison terms and inhumane incarceration conditions. Under federal constitutional law controlled by an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court in recent decades, state rights against excessive punishment have become almost non-existent. State courts and state constitutions represent another pathway to protecting these rights.

With research as the foundation of its work, SLRI’s strategies have grown over the last couple of years to include legal briefing, communications, and managing a network of scholars, advocates, and practitioners. The legal advocacy organization publishes academic articles and newsletters to bring attention to its research, and files briefings to get its legal theories in front of courts. Previously, SLRI has had a more “behind the scenes” role supporting amicus briefings, organizing legal scholars and working pro bono counsel or civil rights law clinics to draft the brief. Going forward, SLRI will start to file briefs in its own name, expressing its own institutional views.

Kyle Barry, SLRI’s director, is also working to reach a broader audience by partnering with scholars on op-eds and speaking to reporters, as he did for a recent feature in The New Yorker.

“I think it’s clicked for a lot of people, in part because in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe from the U.S. Supreme Court. Reproductive rights obviously started to get a lot of state court attention, and there was a lot of recognition that ‘okay, now we have to go to state courts and state constitutions.’ So I think having abortion issues and a lot of electoral issues get national attention as state court issues has been helpful for people to recognize the importance of thinking about excessive punishment as a state court issue as well. Timing has been an important part of it.”

Recognizing the importance of the judges deciding cases in state courts, SLRI has also started to take an active role in campaigns to increase the number of public defenders and civil rights lawyers with public defense experience to serve in federal and state courts. SLRI researched and analyzed the legal career of every active justice in every state supreme court. In addition to a report, this process led to the creation of a database of judges, which Barry shared with the White House Counsel’s office in 2021. At least 13 of the judges are now presiding over federal courtrooms. Soon, this judicial selection advocacy work will be expanded through a new project to identify public defenders in every federal district in the country who would make good candidates for judgeships and who have expressed interest in becoming judges.

On top of all this, SLRI continues to produce and sponsor research and next month, it will host its first public-facing symposium at Rutgers University, where an audience of lawyers, law students and professors, journalists and others will hear from expert speakers and panelists on this issue.

To learn more about SLRI’s work, visit its new website and sign up for newsletter updates.