Law profs rank the top courts
May 27, 2008
Three law professors have written a paper ranking the top courts of all 50 states based on how many opinions the judges put out, how often those opinions are cited by other states’ high courts, and how non-partisan they are. That last criterion is determined by how often judges vote with colleagues who belong to the opposite political party. It looks like these guys (and/or their students) did a whole mess of work on this.
Anyway, if you give equal weight to all three criteria, Maryland’s Court of Appeals is the 14th-best top court in the country. If you don’t give the criteria equal weight, then… well, maybe someone can tell me what happens then, because I’m not confident that I understand this part of the study. (There’s a reason I became a journalist instead of fulfilling that first-grade dream of being an astronomer: less math.)
When the authors ranked the high courts by citations per judge by out-of-state courts, Maryland placed sixth. The Court of Appeals fell pretty much in the middle on the other two measurements.
Bottom line: there is a “strong case” that California’s top court is the best, the researchers conclude.
Hat tip: How Appealing.
CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer
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