Minnesota Supreme Court ranks high in influence
Each state has a top court, usually a supreme court, which decides that state's thorniest legal disputes.
In Minnesota, like other states, justices decide these issues by applying Minnesota law and earlier court decisions to the individual facts of each case. The problem is that statutes and older court rulings don't always address the unique circumstances of the human experience.
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Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Russell Anderson said at those times, justices will look to other states to see how they may have decided similar questions.
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"As a Supreme Court we take the most difficult cases, so we often do find ourselves with novel questions that have not been decided before," Anderson said. "I suspect other states do the same. They're looking to other jurisdictions for a well-reasoned, rational explanation of a decision in a case, and so I suspect that they look to us and we look to them."
Two California attorneys embarked on a study to determine if some states followed other states more often. To do so, they contacted one of the companies that electronically archive court opinions, to analyze 24,000 rulings.
Attorney Jake Dear is one of the study's authors and chief supervising attorney for California's Supreme Court.
The Minnesota Supreme Court has long had a culture of not only announcing decisions in cases, but carefully walking through the analysis that led to those decisions.
"Basically," he said, "we called up LexisNexis and said, 'Have we got a research project for you!'"
The study analyzed each state's Supreme Court opinions back to 1940. The review found some states scored higher because they were larger and more likely to get a cutting-edge legal question dropped on their doorstep.
But Dear said the most important factor was what the court did with the issue once it got it -- the analysis. A state was more likely to follow another state if they could follow the reasoning, and it was complete.
Dear said other states' rulings were sparse, and jumped from idea A to idea C without explaining what happened to B.
"They're so short that it looks like the court didn't want to bother spending a lot of time explaining itself, which is really the most important thing about what appellate courts do," Dear said. "For the parties, they want to know what the result is. But for the development of the law and its future use as precedent, the most important is the analysis. How do you explain yourself? How do you get there?"
A legal scholar who studies Minnesota's Supreme Court opinions and history said he wasn't surprised Minnesota ranked high on the list.
William Mitchell law professor Peter Knapp said the state Supreme Court has long had a culture of not only announcing decisions in cases, but carefully walking through the analysis that led to those decisions.
"I can think of cases from the 1920s, for example, that were written in much the same way," Knapp said. "Even as far back as the 19th century, Minnesota had a share of state Supreme Court justices that were regarded around the nation as being particularly influential judges writing about the law."
There was no one area of law that other states tended to follow Minnesota more than others. The most-followed case was a complex insurance ruling from 1982.
