Arkansas Blog

Wow! I always was impressed by our court's decisions.

I noted yesterday Court ruled on the L.R. Board of Education vs. Similarly Situated Class of Patrons and Taxpayers of the Little Rock School District of Pulaski County, Arkansas ) Affirmed; motion to dismiss denied.

http://www.nwarktimes.com/adg/News/227188/

ARK. BLOG: We had that on the blog at 10:19 a.m. yesterday.

When I clerked for the ASC in 98-99, we had a two to three week turn around handing down decisions. We were the fastest, while still being correct for the most part, than any other State Supreme Court at that time. Most lawyers might disagree with me on this, but I believe part of the reason the Court can turn around decisions so quickly is because we are one of the last, if not the very last, state to require that the record be "abstracted," meaning the trial transcript is condensed into first person, for the Court and it's clerks to read as opposed to not looking at it at all or requiring clerks to go read the entire trial. I don't know how our docket compares to other states, but I'm sure that's a factor as well. In any case, this is nice news to hear.

ARK. BLOG: We had that on the blog at 10:19 a.m. yesterday.<<

Thanks. I'm missing much these days. It's the damn dog. She requires many walks these days.
Then spent a day at the doc office.

It's nice to get something right after finding out our schools are still lagging way behind.

And, this was accomplished by 7 judges who are elected, and not appointed. Imagine that!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

And a HA, HA to boot.

Apparently, staggeringly inconsistent opinions don't hurt a court in this analysis, nor a court's inability to pick a rule and stick to it (see, e.g., charitable immunity). All you need do in this study is churn out a lot of opinions, get cited a bit by other courts, and prove independence by voting with judges from the opposite party. I don't know that those measures are really measures of the quality of a court's jurisprudence.

If anyone wants to wade through the entire article, it's available at the link at the blue name (follow a link at the bottom of the page once you get there. For what it's worth, Arkansas has been ranked at the bottom of a few of these studies as well (see page 8 of the paper) in the areas of judicial competence and impartiality. In addition, the mechanism for measuring quality that the paper uses is number of citations from other courts, and I'm not sure that's really indicative of the quality of an opinion in terms of how it disposes of a case and how it serves as precedent on lower courts in this state. Trust someone who reads Arkansas appellate decisions on a daily basis--many of them are of horrible quality from an intellectual standpoint in terms of the reasoning employed to reach a decision, particularly in the tendency to reason backwards from the Court's preferred result rather than reasoning from established precedent to reach a decision.

Are you blaming the not so supreme court for the schools being behind?
what way is the schools behind?

Gaddis--are you confusing the Court of Appeals with the Supreme Court? Now, there's an appellate court who bends over backwards to keep defendants down and kids in foster care......the most recent example being the Gibson decision handed down Wednesday. (See the blue link.) I stand by my statement, that during the years I was there and the years of the study, the Supreme Court was tops in the Nation and we (the law clerks and Justices) knew it.

I recall the first opinion I ever 'drafted'. The first thing the legislature did when they got into session was revise the law that decision was based on to make the decision void and useless. So, the next few cases come up and guess what? They were inconsistent. After I clerked I did nothing but Appellate work for a while. I had the Court of Appeals reversed 3 times by the Supremes and on my 4th Petition for Rehearing, they reversed themselves. So, Supremes--they're OK in my book, not perfect by a long shot, but OK. The C of A, that's ANOTHER story.

That being said, I downloaded the entire article and will try to read it this weekend. Thanks for the link!

No, litig8or, I am referring to the Arkansas Supreme Court. It's probably worth mentioning here that you were at the Court nearly ten years ago, so your experience is not particularly relevant to the court in its current iteration, which has, by my count, three new members since 1999. The Court of Appeals is pretty bad, too (though a couple of its judges are better jurists than any of the justices on the Supreme Court), but the Arkansas Supreme Court's opinions are rarely, if ever, well-reasoned, and the lack of consistency is appalling. If this Court is one of the best, I shudder to think of the worst.

Ehh...I'd say that, on par, the Court of Appeals does a bit more for a Defendant than the Supreme Court. Example, there was a case last year that the Court of Appeals reversed in a 5-4 opinion. The Supremes, however, in a 7-0 decision, (spending several pages of the opinion telling us why they could not review the casea) found that the Defendant's attorney had made a good enough record at the trial court to be reviewed on appeal. The elevation of form over substance stifles development of the law. Folks can accept losing on the merits, they cannot, however, accept losing on a minor, technical issue. Our courts find sooooooooooooo many ways to avoid ruling on important issues in cases.

Sounds like someone has an idea for a law review article! Disorder in the Court: The Arkansas Supreme Court or something. As first steps, how about defining:

1. what are appropriate measures of a court's quality? one can infer that you think that not reasoning backwards from the preferred result is one of them, and "picking a rule and sticking with it" is another. any way to define those ideas with any degree of precision?

and, as to the former, it is a chicken-and-egg proposition, as is discussed any number of times in law school in jurisprudence and other courses... any lawyer can, for almost every problem, especially the open-ended problems that are faced by courts of highest resort, pick a result and find law to fit. the means to do so are even encoded in the law, for example the canons of statutory construction. it is almost impossible to know from the outside looking in whether the court picked the result and wrote toward it or the other way round. how would you propose to prove it?

as to the latter, be sure to account for the evolutionary nature of the common law, changes in personnel on the court, and legislation, which often does away with a rule.

2. which state's high court would you suggest as an example that lives up to your preferred criteria?

3. how does the u.s. supreme court stack up? i doesn't sound too good using the examples you give.

to stick up for them a bit, speed of handing down decisions is most definitely a judicial virtue and by and large they still live up to it. i do agree that the court of appeals has some marvelous judges on it.

and sjp, the "form" you refer to, as opposed to substance, sounds like procedure, which is quite important.

i don't disagree that many of the court's opinions could be better written and reasoned. i remember my property professor showing us disjoint lines of cases on the same doctrine, with opposite holdings, and the two lines of cases ignoring each other. but your criticisms seem generic ones that people have applied to all courts.