Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton delivered the lecture on 9 September 2026, according to the CWRU Scholarly Commons record of the event. The annual series honours Judge Sumner Canary, who served on the Ohio Court of Appeals for the Eighth District and as United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, and was made possible by the generosity of his widow, Nancy Canary.
Three Narratives Shaping American Constitutional Law
The Sutton Canary Lecture on federalism took as its organising framework what Judge Sutton described as three narratives embedded in American constitutional history: stories that vindicate localism, stories that vindicate nationalisation, and stories that reveal the need for both. The framing positions the history of federalism as a sustained negotiation between local and national authority rather than a settled resolution in either direction.
That intellectual architecture draws on scholarship Judge Sutton has developed over more than a decade. His 2018 book 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law, reviewed in the Harvard Law Review, contends that constitutional law is richest when state supreme courts resist what he calls “lockstepping”: the practice of simply adopting United States Supreme Court interpretations of the Federal Constitution when construing their own state constitutions. Independence, he argues, produces stronger protection of individual rights.
His more recent output extends that theme. A Harvard Law School publications list records a chapter by Judge Sutton titled ‘Federalism’ in The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals (Simon & Schuster, 2026), as well as a co-authored casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, published by West Academic.
Sutton on the Supreme Court and Trump Administration Losses
The portion of the lecture that has drawn the most attention concerned the Sixth Circuit judge’s assessment of the Supreme Court’s most recent term and the conservative supermajority’s handling of challenges to Trump administration policies.
Judge Sutton described the term as ‘so remarkable’ given that the executive was exercising a ‘fairly aggressive’ degree of power. He noted the administration lost several cases at the court, and offered a pointed observation about what those losses reveal.
‘It makes me proud to be a lawyer and proud to be a judge,’ he said, because he can ‘guarantee’ the administration would have won the cases it lost had those matters been put to the Republican-controlled Congress instead.
The argument is not simply that the court acted correctly. It is that the pattern of outcomes is itself evidence of a distinction between judicial and political reasoning. ‘The insight is, well, whatever these Republican appointees are doing, you can’t call it pure politics, because if it was pure politics, they would act just like the Republican Congress,’ Judge Sutton said.
He pressed the point further. ‘There’s something judges are doing, even in this moment where we’re skeptical of the Supreme Court, skeptical of federal judges, maybe state judges. They’re still doing something that you have to call different from party and elected politics,’ he added.
The remarks sit in deliberate tension with the prevailing scepticism about the court’s independence. Judge Sutton is not arguing the court is beyond criticism; he is arguing that its critics should account for the administration’s actual loss record before concluding that conservative appointments produce only conservative political outcomes.
A Lecture Series With a Long Record
The Canary series has featured federal judges, legal scholars, and senior public officials across its history. The 2026 instalment arrived as Judge Sutton prepares to step down as chief judge of the Sixth Circuit, giving the remarks an additional dimension: a senior appellate judge, at the end of a long tenure, making the affirmative case for judicial independence at a moment when that case is contested from several directions at once.
Subject to any publication of the full lecture text, the three-narrative framework Judge Sutton outlined may attract further attention from constitutional scholars working on the relationship between state and federal constitutional development, particularly those engaged with the question of whether state courts can serve as a counterweight when federal constitutional doctrine contracts.