- The Legislature's GOP majority will seek to expand Utah's highest courts by two members.
- Utah's Supreme Court has only five justices, making it an outlier compared to other states.
- Critics of the proposal say it is an attempt to shift the court toward conservative priorities.
Utah’s top lawmakers confirmed on Tuesday that, at the suggestion of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, the Legislature will consider increasing the number of justices on the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals by two members.
The proposal coincides with an increase in workload for Utah’s highest courts, and intends to speed up decisions, according to legislative leadership. It also comes amid Republican frustration over recent rulings that have stalled legislation and scrapped legal precedent.
In interviews with the Deseret News, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, framed the bill as an effort to strengthen the judicial branch by increasing resources, aligning Utah with national norms and expanding perspectives on the bench.
“I hope this helps to balance, both in workload and in judicial philosophy, and we believe it probably has a dual effect,” Adams said. “But it’s needed.”
Unlike two-thirds of other states, the Utah Supreme Court has only five members. The Court of Appeals, which filters cases to the Supreme Court, has seven members. Meanwhile, both bodies have received a record number of legal filings, leading to case backlogs and delayed decisions.
Is Utah an outlier?
A majority of states, totaling 28, have seven-member supreme courts. Another seven state courts, including Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals, have nine justices. And 17 mostly smaller states, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, have five justices.
“Utah’s an outlier,” Schultz said. “I don’t think any rational person would look at it and not say that five sets of eyes is better than seven sets of eyes.”
The size of Utah’s Supreme Court has not changed since 1917, despite the state’s population growing by more than 3 million people. Likewise, the size of the Court of Appeals has not changed since it was created in 1987, when the state was half the size.
Court expansions are not unusual. One analysis found states have expanded supreme courts on 120 different occasions. Only one state, Hawaii, has kept the same size. The 10 states closest to Utah in terms of population have all established supreme courts with seven or nine justices.
Will more justices help?
Data provided by the Utah court system suggests that top appellate courts are overwhelmed by case loads and may benefit from added justices.
In fiscal year 2025, the Utah Supreme Court received 270 legal filings, and the Court of Appeals received 1,143 — both setting new records, and contributing to a 34% increase in legal filings received by both courts combined since fiscal year 2017.
An annual report by the Utah Judicial Council found the Supreme Court was deciding fewer cases than historically, and the Court of Appeals was taking longer to rule, resulting in the number of requests for deadline extensions to double between 2017 and 2024.
“Where Utah’s seven Court of Appeals judges were once responsible for approximately 700 cases each year, they are now handling nearly 1,000 cases annually. This leads to otherwise avoidable delay in the appellate process,” the report stated.
Other Western states, including Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and New Mexico, each added a judge to their court of appeals before the population ratio reached 350,000 per judge, the report found. Utah’s current ratio exceeds 488,000 per Court of Appeals judge.
The report requested lawmakers to provide funding for an additional Court of Appeals judge. However, Chief Justice Matthew Durrant, and Justice Paige Petersen, have said the same is not true of the Utah Supreme Court, arguing that adding more judges could actually slow deliberation.
Is this political retribution?
Critics of expanding the court have criticized the proposal as GOP backlash in response to a series of unfavorable Supreme Court opinions, including a pause on Utah’s elective abortion ban and a decision making certain ballot initiatives immune from legislative changes.
The proposal also comes as Republican lawmakers vow to appeal the state’s redistricting case to the Utah Supreme Court after it resulted in a district judge choosing new congressional boundaries which were submitted by nonprofit groups instead of being approved by the Legislature.
“The urgency with which my colleagues suddenly feel we need to expand the Supreme Court has very little to do with these pretextual reasons about caseload, and everything to do with the fact that my colleagues are getting rulings they’re not happy with,” Sen. Stephanie Pitcher told the Deseret News.
Pitcher, D-Millcreek, called the proposed court expansion a “very thinly veiled attempt” to influence the court’s ideology by creating two new seats Cox can fill with judges who will rule favorably on conservative priorities like abortion, redistricting and transgender access to bathrooms.
This is not a typical check on one branch of government by another, according to Pitcher, it is “retribution.” While she is not opposed to the basic principle, Pitcher said she believes court expansion should not proceed unless supreme court justices tell the Legislature they think it will help them.
But legislative leadership does not expect the expansion of Utah’s highest courts to be a “tough lift” in the upcoming legislative session.
The focus of the policy change is doing “what’s best for the judicial system, for the citizens of the state,” Schultz said. If lawmakers were really trying to pressure the court to change its philosophy, they would be pushing for four more justices, not two, according to Schultz.
Cox dismissed arguments that he was calling for “court packing” during his monthly news broadcast in November. For decades, it has been Republican governors and senators selecting who will sit on the Utah Supreme Court, and that hasn’t changed, he said.