Each year, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) conducts a survey to see how the public is feeling about the job state courts do. While this year’s survey, released at the beginning of December, had some positive news for the courts, it also showed a major drop in public sentiment about the courts provision of “equal justice.”

For example, when this year’s respondents were asked if state courts provide “equal justice to all”, only 44 percent said state courts were doing “well or very well”. Ten years earlier, in the 2015 survey, 57 percent had positive answers to that question.

At the same time, in the 2025 survey, 50 percent said state courts were not doing well or “not at all well” at offering equal justice, compared with 40 percent who expressed that opinion ten years before.

This year, the survey tapped the views of 1,000 respondents who were contacted in November. When asked the more general question of whether they had confidence in state courts, 62 percent said they did. That answer fluctuated in small ways in recent years with a low of 60 percent in the 2022 survey, which tapped opinion in the middle of the pandemic.

Confidence levels were considerably higher prior to the pandemic, although they fluctuated then, as well. In the 2018 survey, for example, 76 percent said they had confidence in state courts, while 71 percent expressed that opinion in the 2017 survey.

There was also some positive news for the state court system. For example, the youngest generation in the workforce (Generation Z) tended to be more optimistic than those who are older. For example, they were “three points more likely to agree that state courts are fair and impartial; six points more likely to agree that state courts are transparent and accountable and nine points more likely to agree that state courts are both innovative and hardworking.”

The survey also offered strong public support for reforms to legal education, with respondents in favor of putting more emphasis on lawyers learning to handle everyday problems. A positive response also came from the idea of offering law students and new lawyers more “in-court supervised experience”.

The report also noted that the confidence level in 2025 is better than for state legislatures (59 percent), governors (57 percent), federal courts (52 percent), or the U.S. Supreme Court (51 percent).

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