How Hawaii Justice Eddins Rejects SCOTUS 'White Noise'

The practical question for state litigators in 2026 is no longer whether federal constitutional doctrine can narrow. It has. The harder question is what remains available when a state court is asked to protect a right, procedure, or local legal tradition after the federal route has become less hospitable.

Justice Todd Eddins’ opinions on the Hawaii Supreme Court answer that question in a form lawyers can use. They do not say that a state may ignore the United States Supreme Court. They say something narrower, and more durable: when the issue is the meaning of the Hawaii Constitution, federal precedent may be persuasive, irrelevant, or wrong, but it is not controlling. That approach works only if the state constitution, state history, or state precedent can carry the argument. It stops when state law directly burdens a right the federal Constitution protects.

That is why the most important part of Eddins’ recent work is not the now-quoted description of some Supreme Court decisions as “white noise.” It is the architecture around that phrase. Across gun rights, interrogation procedure, establishment-clause analysis, and false forensic testimony, his opinions keep returning to the same sequence: begin with the state constitution; identify the state provision’s own text, history, or interpretive tradition; decide whether federal doctrine answers the state-law question; and, if it does not, say so plainly.

The Method Is Primacy, Not Nullification

Eddins is not writing from the premise that federal constitutional law has no force in Hawaii. The premise is older and less theatrical: state constitutions are independent sources of law. If a state constitutional provision resolves the case, a state court need not adopt the United States Supreme Court’s reasoning about a parallel federal provision.

That distinction matters because it turns a political posture into a briefing method. A lawyer who wants to use Eddins’ route cannot merely cite an unpopular federal decision and ask a state court to be braver. The brief has to preserve the state constitutional claim, identify the state provision, give the court a reason to read it independently, and explain why federal doctrine is not binding on that state-law question.

Eddins’ background helps explain the regularity of the approach without making the opinions biographical artifacts. He was a public defender, tried more than 120 jury cases, was unanimously confirmed to the Hawaii Supreme Court, teaches a state constitutional law seminar, and has spoken nationally about state constitutionalism.[1] In a 2024 interview, he put the structural claim directly: “State courts are not beholden to the United States Supreme Court; we are essentially insulated when we decide things based on state constitutional provisions.”[1]

That sentence is doing doctrinal work. It is not a claim of immunity from federal review. It is a claim about decisional authority when the source of law is state law.

Wilson Shows the Boldest Version of the Argument

State v. Wilson is the opinion that made Eddins nationally visible because it refused to read Hawaii’s right-to-bear-arms provision through Heller and Bruen. Article I, Section 17 of the Hawaii Constitution is nearly identical to the Second Amendment, yet the Hawaii Supreme Court held that the state provision protects a collective, militia-centered right rather than an individual right to carry firearms for self-defense.[2]

That move is easy to caricature and harder to answer on its own terms. The opinion did not deny that the federal Second Amendment, as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court, constrains Hawaii. It separated the question. The meaning of Hawaii’s constitution, the court reasoned, had to be determined by Hawaii’s own constitutional history and legal tradition, not by federal incorporation doctrine or the Supreme Court’s modern Second Amendment cases.

Wilson also invoked the “spirit of Aloha,” which Hawaii law codifies in HRS § 5-7.5 as a statutory interpretive principle. That is the part most likely to travel badly if lifted out of context. The aloha spirit is not itself a constitutional clause. Its use in Wilson is novel precisely because the court treated it as part of a broader account of Hawaii’s legal tradition rather than as a free-standing override of constitutional text.

The opinion’s stronger move is not cultural. It is jurisdictional and interpretive: identical or nearly identical words need not have identical state and federal meanings when they were adopted into different constitutional systems and interpreted through different institutional histories. According to one Federalist Society analysis, Wilson was the first post-Heller state supreme court decision to reach a collective-right reading of a state right-to-bear-arms provision that closely tracks the Second Amendment.[3]

The United States Supreme Court denied certiorari in Wilson, but the denial was not quiet. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch issued separate statements respecting the denial, an unusual signal that the Hawaii court’s rhetoric and reasoning had registered at the federal level.[4] The statements did not transform Wilson into a federal case. They did show that state constitutional independence, when written this bluntly, will be read in Washington.

The Same Moves Reappear Outside Guns

Wilson might have been dismissed as a Second Amendment outlier if the pattern stopped there. It did not. Eddins’ later opinions in Zuffante, Hilo Bay Marina, and Granillo show the same method operating in different doctrinal neighborhoods.

In Zuffante, decided in September 2025, the court addressed due process in the interrogation-recording context.[5] The significance for litigators is not merely that Hawaii may protect defendants more robustly than the federal Constitution requires. Many state courts say that. The point is that the opinion treats the Hawaii Constitution as the first object of analysis, not as an afterthought reached only after federal doctrine disappoints.

That ordering changes how a record should be built. If the state constitutional claim is the lead claim, counsel needs evidence and argument directed to state practice, state precedent, and the institutional consequences of the proposed rule. A federal due process argument may remain in the case, but it no longer supplies the ceiling or the grammar.

Hilo Bay Marina, also decided in September 2025, applied a similar independence in the establishment-clause setting.[5] The court’s unified posture matters here. Reporting on the 2025 cases noted concurrences joined by Justices Sabrina McKenna and Vladimir Devens, which undercuts the idea that Eddins is simply freelancing in separate writings.[5] For lawyers, institutional uptake is not atmosphere; it affects how confidently one can ask the court to use the same interpretive route again.

Granillo, decided in July 2026, is where the phrase “white noise” appears. The case concerned false forensic evidence and due process under the Hawaii Constitution. Eddins wrote that the United States Supreme Court “does not chart the course for the Hawaii Constitution,” and described federal precedent as “white noise” when it does not control the state constitutional inquiry.[6]

The formulation is sharp, but the legal claim is conventional if stated without the volume turned up: Supreme Court decisions interpreting the federal Constitution bind state courts on federal questions; they do not bind state courts on the independent meaning of state constitutional provisions. Granillo’s importance is that it says this in a due process case, not just in the politically charged terrain of guns.

What Makes the Pattern Replicable

The repeatable part of the Eddins method is not the rhetoric. It is the sequence of legal permissions. First, identify a state constitutional provision that plausibly governs. Second, argue that state courts should decide that state provision before reaching the federal claim. Third, give the court state-law materials that justify an independent meaning. Fourth, explain why federal doctrine does not answer the state question. Fifth, if federal law supplies a floor, acknowledge it rather than pretending it is not there.

The sequence is especially useful after federal retrenchment because it avoids asking state judges to perform an impossible act. A state supreme court cannot overrule Bruen, Dobbs, or any other Supreme Court decision on federal law. It can decide that its own constitution goes further, differently, or by another route, so long as the state-law basis is adequate and independent.

That is also the point at which weaker briefs fail. “Our state should do more” is not a doctrine. A usable state constitutional argument needs text, history, structure, precedent, or settled state practice. Without that material, the appeal to independence becomes an invitation to preference, and state high courts are right to be wary of it.

Wolford Marks the Federal Boundary

Wolford v. Lopez is the necessary counterweight to Wilson. Decided on June 25, 2026, Wolford involved Hawaii’s restrictions on carrying firearms on private property open to the public. The United States Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Alito, rejected Hawaii’s reliance on the aloha spirit in unmistakable terms: the Second Amendment “cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii, any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple.”[7]

That sentence is not just a rejoinder to Wilson’s style. It identifies the boundary of the method. Wilson interpreted Hawaii’s own constitution. Wolford reviewed a state law that directly restricted conduct protected by the federal Second Amendment as the Supreme Court understands it. In the first posture, Hawaii’s independent constitutional tradition can matter. In the second, it cannot lower the federal floor.

The difference is not academic. After Bruen, Hawaii went from near-zero public carry permits to more than 3,700 permits, according to 2025 attorney general data reported after Wolford.[8] Civil Beat also reported that, after Wolford, the practical burden shifted toward businesses deciding whether to post signage restricting firearms on their premises.[8] Those are consequences of federal supremacy operating where the federal right has already been recognized.

For state constitutional litigators, Wolford is a useful discipline. It prevents Eddins’ approach from being misdescribed as state constitutional nullification. A state may give greater protection than federal law requires. It may not give less protection than federal law guarantees. The difficult work is determining which side of that line a particular case occupies.

What Lawyers Elsewhere Can Borrow

The portable lesson is architectural. Lawyers outside Hawaii cannot borrow the aloha spirit unless their own law supplies an analogous interpretive source, and even then they should be careful about its legal status. HRS § 5-7.5 is statutory, not constitutional. Its role in Wilson depends on Hawaii’s legal materials and the court’s willingness to treat that statute as part of the state’s broader interpretive tradition.

What can travel is the primacy framework. In a criminal procedure case, that may mean leading with the state search-and-seizure clause rather than treating it as a backup to the Fourth Amendment. In a due process case, it may mean developing a state record about reliability, local practice, and remedial consequences. In a religion-clause case, it may mean asking whether the state constitution has a separate anti-establishment history that federal doctrine has no reason to capture.

The preservation point is mundane and decisive. If the state constitutional argument is not raised, developed, and tied to a state-law source, an appellate court may have nothing to use. Eddins’ opinions are valuable to advocates because they show a court willing to take the state-law path when the path has been built. They do not relieve counsel of building it.

Nor do they make every state constitution a one-way ratchet. Some state texts track federal language. Some states have precedent deliberately harmonizing their provisions with federal doctrine. Some courts may require a specific reason to depart before treating a parallel provision independently. A serious brief will confront those limits rather than cite Hawaii as permission to skip them.

Eddins’ contribution is that he has made the state constitutional route visible across enough cases to be studied as method rather than mood. Wilson supplies the boldest assertion of independent meaning. Zuffante and Hilo Bay Marina show the approach outside the Second Amendment. Granillo gives it its bluntest formulation. Wolford supplies the limiting principle. The result is a real model for state constitutional resistance, but it is a model of disciplined independence, not immunity from the United States Supreme Court.

References

1. Justice Todd Eddins interview, Amicus / Slate, May 2024.
2. State v. Wilson analysis, State Court Report / Brennan Center, February 2024.
3. Analysis of State v. Wilson, Federalist Society.
4. Wilson certiorari-denial statements analysis, State Court Report, October 2025.
5. Coverage of Hawaii Supreme Court state constitutional decisions, Slate, September 2025.
6. Coverage of the Granillo opinion, Bolts, July 2026.
7. Coverage of Wolford v. Lopez, NRA-ILA, June 2026.
8. Coverage of Hawaii gun permits and post-Wolford signage effects, Honolulu Civil Beat, June 26, 2026.