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Our project is to research the origins and observance of Ohio voters' mandate to their state Supreme Court in 1912:
The decisions in all cases in the Supreme Court shall be reported, together with the reasons therefor.
That mandate is in the Ohio Constitution's Article IV, Section 2(C).
In recent years, the mandate has been contentious. A related case even reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021.
After a constitutional convention in 1912, Ohio voters approved a mandate for their Supreme Court to report decisions "with the reasons therefor".
In 1925, the mandate appeared for the first time in a report. Justice Wanamaker stressed its wisdom while dissenting in State, ex. rel Durbin, v. Smith, Secretary of State, 102 Ohio St. 591, 651:
The Constitution of Ohio, as amended in 1912, wisely provided that "The decisions in all cases in the supreme court shall be reported together with the reasons therefor." Prior to that time the majority of the cases, often the big and most embarrassing ones, were decided without any opinion or without any "reasons therefor." The people of Ohio realized that the best test of reasonable judgments was sound "reasons therefor".
In 1968, Ohio voters moved the mandate to its own emphatic subsection, 2(C), through the Ohio Judicial System Reorganization Amendment, which is more commonly known as the Modern Courts Amendment (Ⓖ | 🦆).
Despite the mandate, Ohio's Supreme Court has frequently reported decisions without reporting "reasons therefor". For example, when a candidate in the March 2020 primary election asked (Ⓖ | 🦆) the Court to mandate the election be held as scheduled despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Court's reported decision text was merely this: "In Mandamus. Writ denied." State ex rel. Speweik v. Wood Cty. Bd. of Elections, No. 2020-0382, 2020-Ohio-997. When a member of Ohio's House of Representatives then asked (Ⓖ | 🦆) the Court to mandate that the reasons be provided, the Court denied the request and, again, reported its decision without any "reasons therefor". State ex rel. Brinkman v. O’Connor, et al., No. 2020-0389, 2020-Ohio-4053.
NOTE: The Ohio Supreme Court "Reasons Therefor" Project is a private initiative. It is not a product of the Court, and the Court has neither reviewed nor approved it.