The Hawaii Supreme Court has confirmed, in writing, that it does not believe the United States Constitution binds the State of Hawaii. That is not hyperbole. In Granillo v. State, No. SCWC-22-0000740, decided July 15, 2026, Justice Todd W. Eddins used a routine criminal appeal about a decades-old wrongful conviction to launch an eight-page assault on the Supreme Court of the United States, in direct retaliation for the Court’s June 25, 2026 decision in Wolford v. Lopez, 609 U.S. ___, No. 24-1046, which struck down Hawaii’s default rule barring concealed carry on private property open to the public absent express owner consent. The opinion is worth examining closely, because it does something rare: it hands its critics the evidence.
The Spirit of Aloha Meets Its End
To understand why Justice Eddins is angry, you have to go back to State v. Wilson, 154 Haw. 8, 543 P.3d 440 (2024), in which the Hawaii Supreme Court declared that the “aloha spirit” inspires its constitutional interpretation and that this spirit “clashes with a federally mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons.” The Supreme Court denied certiorari in that case in December 2024, but it did not let the theory die quietly. In Wolford, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 6-3 majority, took direct aim at Hawaii’s local-custom argument:
“As the plurality explained in McDonald, the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. … It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii … any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple (Bruen) or the Windy City (McDonald). It applies in the same way to our 50th State (where about 8% of adults possess guns) and our 49th State (where the figure is roughly 59%).”
That single paragraph did more damage to Hawaii’s constitutional theory than any brief filed against it. It told the state, in language impossible to misread, that local attitude cannot shrink an enumerated right incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010).
An Opinion in Search of a Grievance
Granillo itself has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. It concerns a 1989 Maui conviction built on now-discredited FBI hair-and-fiber testimony, and the Hawaii Supreme Court unanimously agreed the conviction had to go, splitting only on the governing rationale. That should have been the whole opinion. Instead, Justice Eddins used the occasion to relitigate his loss in Wolford, writing that the Hawaii Constitution is interpreted “independently, untethered from the Supreme Court’s analysis of the United States Constitution,” and citing Wilson, the spirit-of-Aloha case, as his authority for that independence. An appellate court that reaches past the question presented to settle a score with a higher tribunal is not exercising judicial restraint. It is broadcasting a grievance.
Citing Dred Scott to Attack Originalism
The opinion’s most revealing passage invokes Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) — the decision holding that Black Americans could never be citizens, a ruling erased by the Civil War and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments — as supposed proof that originalism is dangerous. Justice Eddins wrote that “today’s hubristic originalists” resemble the jurists who decided Dred Scott, framing originalism itself as the flaw. But every branch of the federal government we live under today — a Senate with six-year terms, a House with two-year terms, a president chosen through the Electoral College, life-tenured judges confirmed by the Senate — traces to the same 1787 document interpreted according to its original public meaning. Nobody objects to reading Article I, Article II, or Article III as originally understood. The objection surfaces only when the same interpretive method protects the Second Amendment. If Hawaii wants a different constitutional rule, Article V supplies the mechanism; the Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times.
The Democracy Argument Collapses on Contact
The opinion’s deepest contradiction is its treatment of democracy itself. Justice Eddins criticizes the Supreme Court for “overriding what Congress passed” and “what the people chose,” then in the same breath faults the Court for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), which did precisely that — returned a policy question absent from the constitutional text to elected legislatures. Hawaii cannot coherently argue that judicial enforcement of an enumerated right — the right to keep and bear arms, protected by the text of the Bill of Rights and incorporated against every state — is illegitimate “anti-democratic” overreach, while simultaneously insisting that judicial creation of an unenumerated right is untouchable. A constitutional republic exists precisely to prevent a bare majority from voting away the rights of the minority. That principle does not bend based on which right a court happens to favor.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.