Kentucky

Thanks to the Indiana Law Blog for pointing me to a recent law review article study ranking the state's highest courts. Courts - Arkansas Supreme Court rated highly in a U of Chicago study.

Which States Have the Best (and Worst) High Courts?

Here is a link to the 51-page study.

According to the 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

Interestingly enough, the oft-touted Chamber of Commerce study was criticized since only the biggest lawfirms with the biggest ties to insurance and corporations made up their survey base:

The final ranking comes from a non-academic study. This is a ranking of the various state courts put out by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (for purposes of our  discussion, we focus on the 2002 rankings).

32  In this study, close to 1,500 senior lawyers working at firms with revenues of at least $100 million annually were surveyed annually since 2001 for their evaluations of the different state legal systems. As we will discuss in Part V, there is good reason to doubt that these particular lawyers would provide an objective evaluation of state legal systems, as opposed to an evaluation that reflects the perspective of a lawyer who works for a large corporation.

Kentucky's rankings were as follows from this report:

• 34th - number of opinions (productivity).
• 47th - number of out of state citations to their majority opinions (national influence).
• 35th - independence.
• 44th - composite measures of the various separate rankings.