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Opinion of the Court
to the legal authorities as furnished it by counsel." Id., at 745.
B
The Ninth Circuit ruled that this final section of Anders, even though unnecessary to our holding in that case, was obligatory upon the States. We disagree. We have never so held; we read our precedents to suggest otherwise; and the Ninth Circuit's view runs contrary to our established practice of permitting the States, within the broad bounds of the Constitution, to experiment with solutions to difficult questions of policy.
In McCoy v. Court of Appeals of Wis., Dist. 1, 486 U. S. 429 (1988), we rejected a challenge to Wisconsin's variation on the Anders procedure. Wisconsin had departed from Anders by requiring Anders briefs to discuss why each issue raised lacked merit. The defendant argued that this rule was contrary to Anders and forced counsel to violate his ethical obligations to his client. We, however, emphasized that the right to appellate representation does not include a right to present frivolous arguments to the court, 486 U. S., at 436, and, similarly, that an attorney is "under an ethical obligation to refuse to prosecute a frivolous appeal," ibid. (footnote omitted). Anders, we explained, merely aims to "assure the court that the indigent defendant's constitutional rights have not been violated." 486 U. S., at 442. Because the Wisconsin procedure adequately provided such assurance, we found no constitutional violation, notwithstanding its variance from Anders. See 486 U. S., at 442-444. We did, in McCoy, describe the procedure at issue as going "one step further" than Anders, McCoy, supra, at 442, thus suggesting that Anders might set a mandatory minimum, but we think this description of the Wisconsin procedure questionable, since it provided less effective advocacy for an indigent—in at least one respect—than does the Anders procedure. The Wisconsin procedure, by providing for one-sided briefing by counsel against his own client's best claims, probably made a court
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