Utah’s Republican lawmakers believe they’ve set up a judicial process that will outlast their tenure.
“I think we landed in a really good place, and it’s a process that will survive well after all of us leave the legislature,” Sen. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, said on Friday, the last day of the 2026 legislative session.
In an effort to improve judicial transparency, the overhaul of the state’s court systems involved expanding every level of the judiciary, establishing a new court and developing public access to court records and information for Utahns involved in litigation.
The judiciary-focused bills passed this session were met with duplicated concerns from citizens, lawyers and even former members of the Utah Supreme Court — Is the Legislature blurring the separation of powers?
Lawmakers said they were creating bills that represented the wishes of their constituents. The Utah State Bar said they were creating “legislation that subordinates the judiciary” in response to prior rulings they didn’t like.
The Utah Bar officials told the Deseret News that litigation could be a plausible outcome “as courts interpret the new procedures and jurisdictional frameworks created by the bills.”
“Rapid revisions to the organization and operation of the courts, as well as politicalization, also raise broader concerns about maintaining public confidence in a judiciary that has historically been respected for its independence and stability,” the statement continued.
But Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Draper, said on Friday that every bill received input from the courts, and that they “would even agree that we could do more, but it costs a lot of money to create some of that transparency that we’re asking for.”
Two additional bills were approved by the Legislature late Thursday.
Inside Utah’s judicial reform package
Here are key judicial bills already signed by Gov. Spencer Cox or currently in the process of making it to his desk:
HB134: One of the first bills signed into law this session, it marks the first time since 2016 that a state has increased the number of judges on its Supreme Court bench. The court expansion bill added two more judges to the state Supreme Court’s five-person bench, and also added judges to the Court of Appeals, and one district court judge each in Salt Lake City, St. George and Provo.
HB392: The second court structure bill signed by Cox establishes a three-judge court that will focus solely on lawsuits challenging state laws as unconstitutional. Judges will be assigned to the constitutional court through the existing random-judge assignment, and each judge must be from a different district. Funding for three clerks and one coordinator for the judges’ scheduling was also included in the bill.
HB366: This legislation was amended late in the session to address lawsuits stemming from the passage of HB392. Passed on Thursday, HB366 allows any litigant — not just the state — to file a notice requiring a constitutional challenge to be heard by a three-judge panel instead of a single district judge. If the state’s recently enacted three-judge panel system for constitutional challenges is struck down by the courts, then a trigger law would automatically create a new constitutional court.
“We just want to provide some insurance, because we think this is an important ability, when a court is putting on hold a law that has been duly passed by the representatives of the people, that we have a more robust process to look at that,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan, told the Deseret News. “The constitution is clear that the Legislature has the ability to create other courts, and that’s exactly what this would do.”
“All this is trying to do is not to get a particular outcome in a case, but ensure that in these weighty matters where we’re talking about the constitution of a law and whether a law should go into effect or not go into effect, that we have more than one set of eyes that are looking at it,” he said.
HB540: Also passed on Thursday, the bill focuses on judicial transparency by making court records easier for Utahns to access through a searchable statewide court portal. Meaning court proceedings would be recorded and public, with the exception of the justice court. It would also require judges to disclose financial information.