Measuring the professionalization of US state courts of last resort

Elsewhere I have argued that measures of U.S. state legislative professionalization assess individual and organizational capacity to generate and evaluate information in the policymaking process. In this article, I adapt my measure of state legislative professionalization to state courts of last resort, attempting to assess the informational capacity of those bodies in making legal decisions. Specifically, I examine judicial salaries, a court's level of control over its docket, and the number of law clerks employed by the justices. After presenting four variants of the court professionalization measure and investigating their validity, I examine explanations for their observed variance across the states. I conclude by comparing my indices with existing indices and speculating about the utility of such measures.