Putting State Courts in the Constitutional Driver's Seat: State Taxpayer Standing after Cuno and Winn

Authors

Edward A. Zelinsky

Abstract

In DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno and Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, the U.S. Supreme Court definitively terminated the possibilities of taxpayer standing previously opened by the Warren Court in Flast v. Cohen.

under the U.S. Constitution governing state taxes and outlays. This body of constitutional law will be beyond the direct review of the U.S. Supreme Court because that Court has rejected state taxpayer standing in the federal courts.

State court judges will be more inclined than their federal counterparts to uphold state tax and expenditure policies against constitutional challenge. Consequently, these state-friendly cases under the U.S. Constitution, developed by the state courts and unsupervised by the U.S. Supreme Court, will be more permissive toward state policies than would a comparable corpus of cases decided by federal judges.

Recommended Citation

Edward A. Zelinsky, Putting State Courts in the Constitutional Driver's Seat: State Taxpayer Standing after Cuno and Winn, 40 Hastings Const. L.Q. 1 (2012).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_constitutional_law_quaterly/vol40/iss1/1