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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.

This time, we’re looking at the Supreme Court’s unanimity rate in civil cases between 2010 and 2020, tracking the data alongside changes in the Court’s party alignment.

Between 2010 and 2014, the Court continued to have six Republican nominees and only one Democrat.  Although the Table seems to suggest a sharp drop in the unanimity

The party alignment of the Supreme Court remained at six Republican appointees and one Democratic appointee from 2000 through 2009.  Across the entire period, the unanimity rate was 66.05% – twenty points higher than the unanimity rate for the 1990s.  The unanimity rate for 2000 was only 48.98%.  It rose to 56.25% for 2001.  After

This week, we’ve following up our discussion of the academic literature on panel effects with a review of the Court’s unanimity rates compared against the evolving party alignment of the Court.

For 1990 and part of 1991, the party alignment of the Court was five Republicans and two Democrats.  For those two years, the Court’s

Earlier this week, we began a four-part post at the Illinois Supreme Court Review briefly reviewing some of the leading academic literature on the phenomenon of “panel effects” – the theory that appellate panels are a collective decision-maker rather than a group of individual decision-makers, and thus a particular judge’s vote is influenced to some

We conclude our series by reviewing the data for criminal, quasi-criminal and juvenile justice cases between the years 2010 and 2020.  Once again, Los Angeles led, accounting for 142 cases.  Riverside County was next, followed by San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Sacramento and Alameda counties.  San Francisco, which was among the leaders in

This week, we’re concluding our three-week multi-part post on the originating jurisdictions for the California Supreme Court’s civil and criminal cases between 1990 and 2020.  In this post, we’re finishing the civil side of the docket, reviewing the years 2010 to 2020.

As usual, we omit the leading jurisdiction, Los Angeles County, from the Table

Between 2000 and 2009, the California Supreme Court decided 617 criminal, quasi-criminal and juvenile justice cases.  Los Angeles County accounted for 188 of those cases.  Orange County was second, followed by San Diego, Santa Clara, Alameda, Riverside and Sacramento counties.

Twenty additional jurisdictions which produced more than one case apiece during these years are reported

Today, we’re reporting the originating jurisdictions for the Supreme Court between the years 2000 and 2009.  We omit Los Angeles County from the Table to make it more easily readable.  Los Angeles County accounted for 147 civil cases between 2000 and 2009.

San Francisco County was twelfth in population but second in criminal cases.  Next