If you were like me, at about the time you graduated from law school, you discarded essentially all of your casebooks; if you were like some of my more disaffected friends, you did more than discard them.

However, if you kept a few, one of them was probably Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System. Unlike most of the books you used in law school, that one had a theme: the state courts are the primary forums for the vindication of federal rights.