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 as well as 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 the literature on the state‐level adoption of policy. This diffusion literature has shown that states learn from and 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 particular policy domains. In this manuscript, we apply the concept of diffusion to state courts. We do so through the examination of three waves of court‐ordered state education finance reform. Using a dyadic data set covering the period from 1974 until 2002, we find that state courts do emulate other state courts but that emulation is different from legislative emulation and different for each wave of reform.