OCPA column: Researchers find Oklahoma Supreme Court is liberal

Researchers find Oklahoma Supreme Court is liberal

By Jonathan Small

Oklahoma has a reputation for being one of the nation’s most conservative states with Republicans routinely elected to statewide office and the legislature, where the GOP has long held supermajorities.

But our judiciary has been well to the left of the electorate for decades, according to recent independent research.

Data published in the December 2023 edition of “State Politics & Policy Quarterly,” a publication of the American Political Science Association, examined the “party-adjusted surrogate judge ideology” scores (referred to as PAJID) for state judges from 1970 to 2019.

PAJID is a surrogate measure for a given judge’s political preferences based on several factors. Under the system, the higher a judge’s score, the more liberal the judge’s ideology.

Researchers were able to compile PAJID scores for state supreme court justices serving between 1970 and 2019, compiling a dataset with 17,092 unique justice-year observations.

Researchers found a “strong, positive correlation between a justice’s PAJID score and partisanship.”

The median state supreme court PAJID score in Oklahoma was between 70 and 75, reflecting a strong liberal slant, throughout almost the entirety of the 49-year period reviewed.

Only Hawaii, West Virginia and Maryland had supreme courts whose justices’ median PAJID score was as liberal as Oklahoma’s throughout the entirety of the 1970-to-2019 period reviewed.

Put another way, justices on the Oklahoma Supreme Court have been more liberal, overall, than even judges in states like California for nearly five decades.

That probably shocks most voters, but it helps explain why Oklahoma has rated so poorly on various “judicial hellhole” reports issued by lawsuit-reform organizations.

In 2020, Oklahoma was highlighted by the American Tort Reform Foundation after the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down limits on noneconomic damages. The American Tort Reform Foundation called the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling “blatant overreach.”

“Most courts have respected the prerogative of legislatures to enact reasonable limits on awards for pain and suffering,” the foundation’s report stated. “The Oklahoma Supreme Court did not.”

The foundation’s report for 2019-2020 warned, “Throughout the first half of 2019, the Oklahoma Supreme Court significantly diminished the role of the legislature with regard to civil justice policy by handing down activist opinions that either strike down existing laws or interpret them with a complete disregard for their plain meaning.”

In 2019, an American Tort Reform Foundation press release stated that the “problems that we have identified with Oklahoma’s legal environment are now so troubling that we are adding it to our ‘Judicial Hellholes’ list.”

The legal climate in a state can significantly impact, for better and worse, economic growth and job opportunity. Oklahoma policymakers have often supported pro-growth measures in recent years. But our liberal judiciary remains a roadblock to progress and greater opportunity for all.

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.