Leaders and Followers: Examining State Court Ordered Education Finance Reform

Abstract

Much of the state court literature assumes that decisions reached by state courts of last resort are independent of other state courts of last resort. Each state court has its own ideology, a particular set of institutional constraints and confronts different Governors, publics, and state legislatures in rendering decisions. Scholarly research and its assumption of the independence of state level judicial decision making and policy impact stands in marked contrast to much of literature on the state level adoption of policy. This literature has shown that states both often adopt policy that has previously been adopted by neighboring states and learn from or emulate similarly situated states that have previously adopted the policy under consideration. These national or state legislatures look to other nations and states for leadership in a particular policy domain. In this manuscript, we examine the phenomena of state courts emulating other state court rulings through the examination of court ordered state education finance reform and we do so through examining emulation through the three waves of education finance reform. Using a dyadic dataset from 1974 until 2004 we find that state courts do emulate other state courts but that emulation is different from legislative emulation and different for each wave.