Direct and Collateral Federal Court Review of the Adequacy of State Procedural Rules

• Published in: Columbia law review 2003-03, Vol.103 (2), p.243-315
• Main Author: Struve, Catherine T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Appellate courts; Defendants; Federal courts; Federal law; Judges; Legal objections; Litigants; Petitioners; State courts; Trials
• ISSN: 0010-1958
• DOI: 10.2307/1123694

If a state's highest court refuses to consider a litigant's federal-law contention because the litigant failed to comply with a state procedural rule, the litigant's default will bar Supreme Court review (and, usually, federal habeas review) if the procedural ruling is independent of any federal law questions and adequate to support the judgment. State procedural requirements sometimes are found inadequate, however, and one potential basis for such a finding is that the requirement imposes an "undue burden" on the assertion of a federal right. Although the standard notion of the "undue burden" analysis is that it should take the form of a facial, rather than an as-applied, review, this Article contends that the Court's prior analyses actually span a spectrum from facial to more case-specific. However, a comparison of the relative institutional attributes of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts suggests that the latter are better suited to engage in searching as-applied review. Accordingly, this Article concludes that the Court generally (though not always) should abstain from performing rigorous as-applied adequacy analysis on direct review, but that the federal courts should be able to employ such an analysis in habeas proceedings.