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If you’ve been following my recent articles on the Oklahoma Supreme Court, you might be justified in thinking I simply disagree with the political leanings of the justices. After all, I’ve been discussing “political” cases (or “public law”) and mostly disagreeing with those justices who were put on the Court by Democrat governors (with the help of the mostly liberal Judicial Nominating Commission). 

But my critique of these opinions is not only that the outcomes are bad as a matter of policy. They are also bad as a matter of law. Many of the justices are simply not skilled at judging. I’ll explain using a workers’ compensation case from 2016.

In Torres v. Seaboard Foods, LLC, the Oklahoma Supreme Court took up an appeal from the Workers’ Compensation Commission which had denied benefits for an alleged cumulative trauma because the employee had not been working for 180 days as required by statute. Unwilling to let a claimant leave empty-handed, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, including the lone Republican appointee, struck down the 180-day provision as a violation of the Oklahoma Constitution’s due process clause.

This is where things got a little complicated. The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in interpreting the Oklahoma Constitution, is not required to use the same tests as the United States Supreme Court when it analyzes similar provisions in the United States Constitution. In fact, an argument can be made that they shouldn’t be treated the same because the United States Constitution primarily sets forth what the federal government can do while the Oklahoma Constitution primarily outlines what the state government cannot do. In other words, there’s a good argument that state courts should be more deferential to state legislatures than federal courts are to Congress.

Still, the Oklahoma Supreme Court decided to apply the same due process analysis to the 180-day provision that the United States Supreme Court applies when it analyzes due process claims under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Only it really didn’t—and it didn’t explain the inconsistency. 

The Court acknowledged the law should be scrutinized under a rational basis test—where the Court is very deferential—only striking down the law where there’s no rational basis for the law. The opinion analyzed cases where a law discriminated against “illegitimate children,” cases that weren’t even decided on due process grounds but under the “equal protection” clause. The Court also discussed cases involving fundamental rights, like the First Amendment right to association, which are analyzed under a more stringent test than laws affecting other rights. In other words, the Court either had no idea what it was doing, or it was simply grasping at straws to reach a desired end—or both. 

Furthermore, it’s difficult to tell on whom the Court placed the burden to prove its case. In traditional rational-basis review, the burden to prove that the law is not rationally related to a legitimate government purpose is on the individual challenging the law. But the Court spent most of its time challenging the arguments made by the employer and the State Chamber of Commerce. In other words, despite recognizing the legitimate government purposes of the statute, the Court nevertheless placed the burden on the wrong party. 

The Court’s incoherent reasoning makes it impossible to understand what it is doing. Several of the justices repeatedly offer up shoddy legal analysis compelling any fair analyst to conclude they are bad at their jobs. Alternatively, those same justices could just be so eager to reach a certain result that they don’t care how they get there. That’s just another, perhaps worse, way to be bad at your job.