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Kirk Jenkins brings a wealth of experience to his appellate practice, which focuses on antitrust and constitutional law, as well as products liability, RICO, price fixing, information sharing among competitors and class certification. In addition to handling appeals, he also regularly works with trial teams to ensure that important issues are properly presented and preserved for appellate review.  Mr. Jenkins is a pioneer in the application of data analytics to appellate decision-making and writes two analytics blogs, the California Supreme Court Review and the Illinois Supreme Court Review, as well as regularly writing for various legal publications.

Tomorrow at 3:00 pm Eastern (noon California time), I will join a panel discussion of the principal differences between state appellate practices around the country.  The first in a series, this time we will be discussing Arizona, California and Nevada.

From the program description, with sign-up information:

There may be significant differences among appellate

We’ve been reviewing the data for the average length of majority opinions during the 1990s and comparing it for correlations to the unanimity rate.  In this post, we’re looking at the criminal docket. It turns out that the 1990s were a difficult time for this metric, given that the average length of majority opinions didn’t

A few posts ago, I noted that analytics research has demonstrated a correlation between the length of majority opinions and the rate of unanimous opinions – shorter opinions, more unanimity; longer opinions and less unanimity.  So what happened for civil cases between 1990 and 1999?

As we noted a few posts ago, majority opinions were

Today, we’re reviewing the Supreme Court’s criminal docket during the 1990s – were total caseloads declining and was the Court writing longer opinions?

For the decade, the Court decided 523 criminal cases.  The Court filed 17,588 pages of majority opinion, and average of 33.63 pages per case – half again longer than the average civil

The sharpest decline in original proceedings between 2011 and 2021 was in the Fourth District – 41.43%.  The Fifth District was second, declining 39.06%.  New filings in the Third District were down 38.43%.  New original proceedings are down in the First District by 31.52%.  New filings were down 26.03% in the Sixth District.  The smallest

This week, we’re wrapping up our review of the Court of Appeal’s dockets over the past twenty years, tracking the declines in the court’s docket.

The steepest decline across the eleven years occurred in the Third District, where new notices of appeal declined by 27.43%.  Next was the Sixth District, which declined by 24.37%.  Dockets

Today, we’re reviewing the data for new original proceedings – petitions for writ of mandate, mandamus and the like – between 2001 and 2010.  With the exception of the Fifth District, which saw a 24% increase in original proceedings, the remaining Courts of Appeal saw relatively flat numbers in original proceedings.

The First District began