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Judges and courts get evaluated and ranked in a variety of contexts. The President implicitly ranks lower-court judges when he picks some rather than others to be promoted within the federal judiciary. The ABA and other organizations evaluate and rank these same judges. For the state courts, governors and legislatures do similar rankings and evaluations, as do interest groups. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, produces an annual ranking of the state courts that is based on surveys of business lawyers. These various rankings and evaluations are often made on the basis of subjective information and opaque criteria. The secretive nature of these evaluations potentially allows organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce to use rankings to advance their own specific agenda. Our Article rests on the premise that these organizations that do their rankings based on opaque data and criteria need competition. Competition will force competing metrics to make transparent the underlying measures on which they are based and thereby foster the generation of higher quality metrics to rank judges. Using publicly available information and easy to reproduce measures, we construct an alternate set of rankings of the state courts that we then match up against the rankings from the Chamber of Commerce. Our measures are admittedly coarse. Nevertheless, to the extent they are credible, transparent, and significantly different from those of organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the hope is that they will force those organizations to better explain the methods and information that underlie their rankings.
The Duke Law Journal is published six times per year, in October, November, December, February, March, and April, at the Duke University School of Law. The journal is among the most prestigious and influential legal publications in the country. Edited by a student board, approximately one-third of each issue's contents consists of student notes dealing with current legal developments, with the remaining content being devoted to articles and comments by professors and practitioners. Generally one issue each year is devoted to administrative law and often another issue is in the form of a symposium.
Duke Law School was established as a graduate and professional school in 1930. Its mission is to prepare students for responsible and productive lives in the legal profession. As a community of scholars, the Law School also provides leadership at the national and international levels in efforts to improve the law and legal institutions through teaching, research, and other forms of public service. Although Duke University is young by comparison to other major American universities, its academic programs and professional schools together have attained an international stature and a reputation for quality and innovation that few universities can match. Among the Law School's unique strengths are an extensive network of interdisciplinary collaboration across the Duke campus and an emphasis in teaching and research initiatives addressing global and international issues.
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