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Abstract

Five years ago, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, aligned itself with a growing number of states by adopting the primacy method of state constitutional decisionmaking. Under the primacy method, a state court decides an issue of constitutional law by first looking to that state's own constitution; if the issue is resolvable on state constitutional grounds, the federal constitutional grounds are not reached. Adoption of the primacy method by numerous state courts has generated considerable debate concerning issues of state constitutional law. Little discussion, however, has focused on the methodology of state constitutional adjudication. As a result, the interpretive controversy characterizing federal constitutional law has yet to emerge at the state level with any degree of intensity. Notwithstanding the above, a recent line of decisions involving the right to civil jury trial under the Maine Constitution brings the issue of proper adjudicative principles in state constitutional decisionmaking sharply into focus. In State v. Anton, decided in 1983, the Law Court unanimously ruled that article I, section 20 of the Maine Constitution "preserves the right to jury trial in civil actions where that right existed when the Maine Constitution was adopted." Thus, under Anton, a present-day litigant seeking a trial by jury was required to show that he would have been entitled to a jury trial prior to 1820, when the Maine Constitution was adopted. After twice applying the Anton test to decide right-to-jury-trial questions under article I, section 20, the Law Court unanimously discarded that test in favor of a dramatically different test. In City of Portland v. DePaolo, decided only four years after Anton, the court held that if the present-day litigant is "exclusively seeking a money recovery," the litigant necessarily enjoys the right to a jury trial, unless the opposing party can show that "at the time the Maine Constitution was adopted that action or its pre-1820 analogue was not tried to a jury." In reaching its decision, the Law Court made no mention of the Anton case. Indeed, the only attempt the court made at confronting Anton consisted in two veiled references, one to "nice semantic distinctions [and] wooden interpretative principles," and the other to "intimations or statements" in prior cases that were "incompatible with the broad view of the guarantee of a jury trial" as presently expressed in its opinion. Such an astonishing reversal of prior state constitutional construction demands an inquiry into the proper role of stare decisis in state constitutional adjudication. This Note surveys Maine precedents treating the constitutional right to a civil jury trial. It then discusses the common law principle of stare decisis, arguing that stare decisis should play a prominent role in Maine constitutional decisionmaking. Finally, the Note concludes that the DePaolo court violated stare decisis by: (1) improperly discarding the Anton test as the standard for deciding right-to-jury-trial questions under article I, section 20; and (2) improperly failing to confront directly State v. Anton in executing its decision.

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