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In 2008, a study issued by the University of Chicago ranked the Arkansas Supreme Court as the second best state supreme court in the nation, based on the justices' productivity in issuing opinions, quality of opinions, and independence from partisan pressures. The last two decades have seen the Arkansas Supreme Court issue a multitude of opinions considering separation of powers, public education, prior restraint of the press, expanded rights under the Arkansas Constitution, class actions and tort reform. This article highlights many of the most significant opinions from the last two decades and comments on their impact in Arkansas and beyond. Through the sampling of significant and landmark decisions handed down by the Arkansas Supreme Court, the article provides an excellent primer on unique aspects of Arkansas law, as well as an invaluable insight to the analytical process of Arkansas's highest court. In doing so, attention is drawn to the quality of the Arkansas Supreme Court's work in an array of areas and the resulting impact the Court has had on jurisprudence in Arkansas and throughout the nation.

Principal-agent analyses of delegation to international organizations have advanced our understanding of international cooperation through institutions. However, broader tests of why and when states delegate are not possible without a clear means for objectively identifying and measuring delegation. This paper develops a metric for delegation based upon the services the agent provides to its principals and the resources and autonomy it has to provide those services. This numerical metric is continuous and generalizable to a wide variety of principal-agent relationships. This paper then demonstrates the face validity of the measure with case studies of delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The paper concludes with a test of Realist and Institutionalist hypotheses for cooperation using the delegation metric, demonstrating the complexity of the underlying reasons we observe delegation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11558-009-9076-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Adapted from the source document.