Connor Morgan (Harvard Law School) has posted Judging the Ordinary Bounds of Judicial Review: A Proposal For How Federal Courts Should Review State Courts' Interpretations of State Election Laws Under Moore v. Harper (62.2 Harv. J. on Leg. (forthcoming 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
At the conclusion of the majority opinion in Moore v. Harper, cryptic dicta warned that federal courts should review state court decisions about election-related state laws to ensure that state courts do not "transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review." The Moore Court provided little guidance about how federal courts should engage in this "Moore review."
Legal scholars warn that federal courts could use Moore review to arrogate power to themselves at the expense of state courts. But scholars have not yet considered in sufficient detail how federal courts should engage in Moore review, in a way that both vindicates the federal entitlement guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause and preserves the appropriate balance of power between the federal and state judiciaries.
In this Article, I build upon existing scholarship to propose a two-step analysis by which a federal court should engage in Moore review. In this inquiry, the federal court should determine whether the state court adhered to its ordinary interpretive methodology and, if it did not, whether that deviation was reasonable.