Which states have the best (and worst) high courts?

Want to know? You’ll have to check it out in a paper by the same name authored by Stephen Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, and Eric Posner. It’s available on SSRN here. I tell you what, I’ll give you the top five contenders for (best overall) state high courts and the abstract below the fold.

Top 5 State High Court Contenders (no particular order):

California

Arkansas

North Dakota

Montana

Georgia

(see page 24 of the manuscript).

ABSTRACT:

This paper ranks the high courts of the fifty states, based on their performance during the years 1998-2000, along three dimensions: opinion quality (or influence as measured by out-of-state citations), independence (or non-partisanship), and productivity (opinions written). We also discuss ways of aggregating these measures. California and Delaware had the most influential courts; Georgia and Mississippi had the most productive courts; and Rhode Island and New York had the most independent courts. If equal weight is given to each measure, then the top five states were: California, Arkansas, North Dakota, Montana, and Ohio. We compare our approach and results with those of other scholars and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose influential rankings are based on surveys of lawyers at big corporations.