Brooks v. New Hampshire Supreme Court

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

Balancing responsibility between federal and state governments in a republic that assigns interlocking sovereignty to each often requires federal courts to walk an unsteady tightrope. From a federal court’s perspective, this special sort of judicial funambulism always must proceed in the spirit of cooperative federalism tempered, however, by the need to avoid the pitfalls inherent in blind deference to state autonomy.

The case at hand implicates the division of responsibilities between federal and state judicial systems but does not require us to walk a very high wire. We…