WV's consistently moderate legislature

Below is google public data chart of Shor and McCarty's Aggregate Data for Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures, available at http://americanlegislatures.com/. The chart has senate ideology on the x-axis and house ideology on the y-axis. Click the play button to view data over time. Higher numbers indicate a more conservative legislature. West Virginia's legislature is constituently moderate in both houses over the time period that the data set covers. It will be interesting to see if this stays this way as the Republicans have made gains in recent years. For information on how they computed these data see: Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty. The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures American Political Science Review, 2011, 105, 530-551.



 Shor, Boris; McCarty, Nolan, 2013-05, "May 2013 Updated Aggregate Data for Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures", http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/21404 UNF:5:Gxvn/P6NkDXQyga+3BnG+A== V1

Women on State Courts of General Jurisdiction

I also added the data on women in state legislatures. See: And here is a series of Maps showing the same data:

Timeline of Firsts for West Virginia Women in the Law

The years in parentheses indicate the year that each woman graduated from WVU college of Law. If there is no year in parentheses she did not graduate from the WVU college of law. This video is for a paper I'm writing on female judges in West Virginia. As it stands West Virginia has the lowest percentage of women on courts of general jurisdiction. More to come.

Judicial Selection to State Courts of Last Resort (State Supreme Courts)

This is the first of a series of posts that will accompany an article of mine that will be published in the West Virginia Law Review on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Public Financing Pilot Program entitled “A Horse of a Different Color: Distinguishing the Judiciary from the Political Branches in Campaign Financing." This chart shows how states have selected judges to state courts of last resort since the founding of the US. Time is along the x axis and the number of jurisdictions is along the y axis. This chart breaks down appointment selection systems into lifetime and appointment for term. This video map should be used in connection with the charts above to get a spatial understanding of the history of judicial selection methods. It shows how judges have been selected to state courts of last resort (supreme courts) since 1776. Red = Partisan Elections. Pink = Non-Partisan Elections. Green = Appointment for Term. Yellow = Lifetime Appointment. Blue = Merit Selection.