Continuous Quality Improvement is the term used to measure progress toward achieving safety, permanency, and well-being for children in foster care. This report highlights the results of a 2014 survey conducted by the National Resource Center on Legal and Judicial Issues asking states to identify how they are using performance measures to improve the lives of children in care, which measures are being used, whether the newly-created well-being measures are being integrated into the original set of court performance measures, and how performance measures are being used to support Continuous Quality Improvement. Although there is much more to do, the number of performance measures being used, the number of states sharing data between courts and child welfare agencies, and the number of documented examples of improvement in lives of abuse and neglected children are all encouraging signs.

There are no official statistics for the total number of adoptions within the United States. In response, this study collected and analyzed data from a variety of sources to develop national and state adoption estimates for the years 2000 to 2009. Sources include state courts, state child welfare agencies, state bureaus of vital records, and the U.S. Department of State. Subtotals for public, intercountry, and other adoptions also are provided. Results indicate that the number of adoptions decreased from 2000 to 2009. The trends discussed in this article may have implications for future adoption policy and practice.

Courts, child welfare agencies, and schools are all important to the achievement of safety, permanency, and well‐being for children in foster care. Although safety and permanency performance measures have been established, tested, and implemented, the development of court‐related well‐being measures have not. This article describes the initial effort to establish a set of educational well‐being measures to track success in improving educational outcomes for children in foster care. Key Points for the Family Court Community: This article provides insights to assist children in care achieve successful educational outcomes—a key to becoming self‐sufficient, productive adults. These newly developed education performance measures provide courts with a tool to measure the educational outcomes for children and youth under its jurisdiction.

Given that courts have the responsibility to ensure the state is providing proper care to children in its custody, courts need to consider whether those children over whom they have jurisdiction are receiving a quality education and are physically and emotionally healthy. Court well-being measures were not developed when the safety, permanency, timeliness, and due process measures were established. However, there have been recent efforts to address this void. This article describes the newly developed set of well-being measures for courts to track success in improving well-being outcomes in the areas of physical health, mental health, maintaining permanent relationships, transition to adulthood, and enhanced family capacity to provide for their children's needs.

I. KEY ROLES OF APPELLATE COURTS The controversy over Justice Sotomayor's statement that the "Court of Appeals is where policy is made" illustrates that there is still confusion over the role of appellate courts. (1) That confusion is exacerbated by the recent movement toward measuring judicial productivity by opinion production, as noted below. Appellate courts have two primary functions: "error correction" to ensure that law is interpreted correctly and consistently and "law making" to provide a means for the development of law through their decisions and explanations of decisions. (2) In states with only one appellate court, that one court must perform both functions. In states with two levels of appellate courts, the intermediate appellate court is often assigned the error-correcting role and the court of last resort, most often called the supreme court, (3) is primarily concerned with the development and declaration of law. Indeed, a primary rationale for the creation of intermediate appellate courts is to dispose of the bulk of appeals so that supreme courts can focus on cases with significant policy implications or cases of high salience to the public. More than thirty years ago, a group of scholars noted that they had observed an emerging societal consensus that state supreme courts should not be passive, reactive bodies, which simply applied "the law" to correct "errors" or miscarriages of justice in individual cases, but that these courts should be policy-makers and, at least in some cases, legal innovators. (4) As courts of last resort, state supreme courts have the final authority on issues most basic to people's lives. In the words of Professor Rosenblum: [I]n the complex system of government we adopted, most questions of private law were left to the states. The national government had almost no part in establishing or developing the law of property, contracts, wills, personal injury or damages.... [W]ithin the states it was often the courts rather than the legislatures that actually formulated such law. (5) Moreover, state courts of last resort "interpret not only state laws but also federal laws," and, in the process, they "contribute significantly to public policy." (6) Justice Brennan acknowledged as much when he wrote that "state courts have responded with marvelous enthusiasm to many not-so-subtle invitations to fill the constitutional gaps left by the decisions of the Supreme Court." (7) Professors Stumpf and Culver argue that the trend continued as the Burger and Rehnquist courts became more deferential to state courts, with the Supreme Court "literally inviting an increased activism in state judicial policy-making, and in many instances state supreme courts have displayed their willingness, if not at times their eagerness, to move into the vacuum." (8) If this trend continues, the state supreme courts will increasingly "'define the quality of life' in American states and communities." (9) It is interesting to note that a very recent poll showed that seventy-one percent of Americans say their state supreme court should keep its ability to decide controversial issues, and sixty-eight percent believe that the courts either have the appropriate amount of power or should be awarded even greater power. (10) Only twenty-four percent thought the state legislature and the governor should have more power over the courts.) (11) Another indication of state supreme courts' increased role in policy making is the renewed interest in election of judges and justices. According to Roger Warren, both a former judge and a former president of the National Center for State Courts, [s]tate judicial elections have become increasingly like elections for political office: expensive, contentious, partisan, political, and dominated by special interests.... Electing state court judges attuned to a particular special interest or ideology, and defeating those not so attuned, is increasingly viewed by political parties and special interests as politics--and business--as usual. …

Amicus briefs can affect the perspective from which an appellate court views a case by showing how the decision is important to others not party to the case, by providing additional information and expertise that parties may not have, and by developing legal arguments that parties:sometimes cannot. Whereas most studies of amicus curiae briefs focus on the influence of these third-party briefs on decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, this article considers amicus curiae briefs in state appellate courts. Considering amicus briefs from this perspective promises to benefit both courts, because they can encourage the type of amicus briefs they find most helpful, and the organizations that file them, because they will have better information on what appellate courts look for in amicus briefs. How useful are amicus briefs to state courts of last resort? Most respondents, chief justices and appellate court clerks from the courts of last resort in thirty-nine states, viewed amicus briefs as a benefit but think they could be made more useful by being consolidated with other briefs where possible and by focusing on providing new information and implications of decisions not provided by the parties.

ABSTRACT The number of domestic adoptions has remained relatively constant over the past 15 years, varying between 121,000 and 127,000, but placements have increasingly been completed by public agencies. Adoption of foreign-born children in the United States has nearly tripled in the past 20 years. Despite the increased national interest in adoption in the past decade and the efforts of many dedicated individuals and agencies, it is still difficult to determine the total number of adoptions in the United States. No one agency is charged with compiling adoption information on all adoptions in the United States, and the agencies that do have access to some types of adoption information have no mandate or incentive to compile that information so that it could be integrated with other sources of adoption information.

This study examines the use of amicus curiae briefs in state courts of last resort. Key findings are that use of amicus varies greatly among states, with the majority of filings occurring in a small number of states. The hypothesis that restrictiveness of court rules may impact the filing of amicus briefs was tested, but not confirmed, leading to speculation that extensive filing of amicus briefs may lead to more restrictive court rules. Amicus briefs were most often used in tort and criminal cases. Finally, the courts' willingness to acknowledge, cite, and solicit amicus briefs was explored as a possible indicator of their influence. Amici were acknowledged in at least a third of the cases, and arguments made in the briefs were discussed in 82 percent of the sample cases.

With all of the changes in federal law relating to child maltreatment, foster care, and adoption, courts have become active partners with child welfare agencies in assuring safety and permanency for children. Outcome measures are needed to track achievement of the distinct goals of courts and those goals they share with child welfare agencies. This article presents a set of measures that focuses on the court contribution to desirable outcomes for children and families. These measures have undergone extensive development, review, and field testing by representatives from several national organizations interested in court reform and child welfare, but they still require more discussion and refinement. Indeed, outcome measures are an essential component of a process of continuing improvement, which means they need to be reviewed periodically to ensure they are valid, reliable, and not redundant.

udges and others who work in our nation's courts—prose- cutors, defenders, bailiffs, and sheriffs, among others— have become targets of a range of hostile acts. These acts include inappropriate communications, direct threats, inappro- priate approaches, and physical assaults. While much violence is personal and concrete, the direct result of a grievance, some violence is a largely impersonal and symbolic attack against public institutions or officials. These acts are attempts to make a general statement, using a public setting such as the court as a platform. Thus, a threat or attack against a judicial official, or against a courthouse, can also serve as a symbolic attack against the justice system as a whole. Symbolic attacks on the judicial system heighten the stakes and the challenges that must be addressed in a pluralistic democ- racy, for it is largely through the judiciary that individuals with conflicting interests can seek remedies and thereby defuse esca- lation before it reaches the level of outright violence. Court security resources are limited at virtually every judi- cial level and in each judicial jurisdiction. Only in rare instances can a judicial official be provided with protection twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It becomes essen- tial, therefore, to develop tools to assess threats and to distin- guish between those threats that are real and those that are not. Although investigative, assessment, and management protocols have recently been designed for use in the federal judicial sys- tem, no such protocol is available for the protection of state and local judicial officials. Effective protection of any public or judicial official has two key components. The first consists of a range of physical mea- sures that may be employed to deter an attack. Armored limou- sines, metal detectors, and armed law enforcement officers are some examples. Such physical measures are often widely employed but inherently limited. Less visible but equally important are efforts to identify persons and groups who may have the intent and capacity to attack before they come within lethal range of the target. The process of identifying those who may pose threats comprises a sequence of activities involving investigation, assessment, and management. In order to be effective, such a program must be built upon an operationally relevant knowledge base of actual attacks and near attacks, and instances where persons have communicated threats or other expressions of inappropriate interest. Such a knowledge base does not exist for judges and other court officials. This article reviews recent efforts to respond to violence directed against federal, state, and local judicial officials, as well as against the judiciary itself, and proposes that a program of research be undertaken to aid in the development of protocols of threat investigation, assessment, and management. Two sources of evidence underscore the seriousness of the problem and the need for such a research program: (1) individual case histories and personal experience (recounted by judicial offi- cials and leaders of their professional associations); and (2) quantitative information (such as the rates at which judicial officials experience threats and attacks and the degree to which these vary by geographical location and judicial jurisdiction). The following individual acts of violence against the judi- ciary nationwide provide cause for concern: