Ramos v. Louisiana

By overruling Apodaca and holding the Sixth Amendment's unanimity requirement fully incorporated against the states, the Court reinforces the individual right to a jury trial as a check on state power to imprison. Sotomayor's concurrence emphasizes this is 'the right to put the State to its burden... before facing criminal punishment,' a core liberty interest against arbitrary law enforcement.

The opinion addresses stare decisis, incorporation doctrine, and jury-trial rights rather than legislative process or democratic accountability. Any consent-related implication (e.g., state legislatures' original enactment of the laws) is incidental to the constitutional holding.

Kavanaugh's concurrence extensively discusses stare decisis as rooted in Article III 'judicial Power,' citing Hamilton's Federalist 78 concern about avoiding 'arbitrary discretion in the courts.' The case does touch federalism by imposing a uniform federal constitutional rule on state criminal procedure, but this is better captured under minority_protection (6b) than as a classic separation-of-powers dispute; the internal judicial-restraint debate is the dominant thread here.

This engages sub-element 6a: non-unanimous jury rules allowed a jury majority to override dissenting jurors' votes to convict, and Sotomayor's concurrence details how Louisiana's and Oregon's laws originated to dilute the influence of racial minorities on juries. Reversing the beneficiary class (i.e., if the rule instead protected majority-favored defendants) would not change the structural logic—the core holding restores an individual procedural right against majoritarian conviction regardless of who benefits, supporting confidence despite the historical-racial framing being contextual rather than the holding's formal basis.