Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

Hawaii’s Top Court Unleashes ‘Unserious Screed’ Against Conservative-Majority Supreme Court

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park (Niagara66 / Wikimedia Commons)

The Hawaii Supreme Court used eight pages in a ruling released Wednesday to take umbrage with major decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The high court ruled in Wolford v. Lopez, released on June 25, that Hawaii’s law requiring private property owners who wished to allow concealed carry on the premises to clearly post signs that carrying guns was allowed was unconstitutional because it violated the Second Amendment. In its ruling in Granillo v. Hawaii, a case involving claims of a wrongful conviction, the Hawaii court attacked Supreme Court decisions while implying the justices were supporting the reasoning behind the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

“We interpret the Hawaiʻi Constitution on its own terms.  The United State Supreme Court’s construction of the federal Due Process Clause does not define the protections of our state’s due process clause. This court ‘reason[s] independently, untethered from the Supreme Court’s analysis of the United States Constitution,’” the opinion states. “The Court that now defines federal due process does not honor the work of 1954. It revives the work of 1857 [The year the Dred Scott Case was decided]. The work of 1896 [the year Plessy V. Ferguson was decided]. The Constitution must be interpreted ‘according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted.’”

“It is an appalling departure from judicial restraint and decorum,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Lines such as ‘The Roberts Court sees only white’ would make an MSNBC commentator blush. This is nothing more than an unserious screed rather than a reasoned opinion.”

Chief Justice John Roberts did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF regarding the Hawaii court’s opinion.

In a 2024 ruling involving a person charged with illegally carrying a firearm, the Hawaii Supreme Court invoked the “spirit of Aloha” while ignoring Supreme Court precedents, including New York State Rifle and Piston Association v. Bruen.

The Hawaii Supreme Court directly challenged the Supreme Court over Bruen and Wolford, accusing the high court of “[m]aking the country more dangerous with a Second Amendment unmoored from text or history and unrecognizable to the framers who wrote it. (‘disabl[ing] the states’ responsibility to protect public safety, reduce gun violence, and safeguard peaceful public movement’ with its deadly jurisprudence). Then striking down a careful law and showing disdain for Hawaiʻi’s constitutional traditions.”

Prior to that rant over Bruen and Wolford, the Hawaii Supreme Court claimed that the Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign finance, the Voting Rights Act and the administrative state were attacks on democracy, while also targeting the four justices who did not find that the 14th Amendment granted birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara.

“That’s not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately,” the Hawaii Supreme Court opinion said. “But it’s enough. Article I, section 5 needs no part of this. The Hawaiʻi Constitution was built to stand on its own.”

“The Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Wolford v. Lopez in response to the 2024 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling, which the Supreme Court allowed to stand on a technicality. “It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8% of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59%). Merely local attitudes can neither shrink nor inflate the meaning of fundamental Bill of Rights guarantees that apply to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Alito also rebuked the Hawaii Supreme Court for citing elements of Louisiana’s “Block Codes” to defend the concealed carry law.

“As we laid out in McDonald, the right to keep and bear arms was crucially important for vulnerable blacks during this period,” Alito continued. “And this was well-understood by the Republicans in Congress who were responsible for drafting, approving, and securing the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Republican Party Platforms of 1856 and 1860 called for protection of the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Unless we put history entirely out of our minds, Hawaii’s claim that this tainted artifact illuminates the original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms cannot be taken seriously.”

When reached for comment, attorney Stephen Halbrook referred the DCNF to a June 25 post on the Volokh Conspiracy in which he observed that the Supreme Court “calls out both lower courts and states that have resisted its Second Amendment jurisprudence,” observing that many have attempted to apply the logic from the dissent former Associate Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in 2008’s Heller decision.