Let’s wind down the week with a look at where the Court’s tort cases originated between 1990 and 1999, and what the reversal rate from each District was.
The Court decided 18 tort cases from San Francisco’s First District – two from Division One, six from Division Two, three from Division Three, five from Division
For the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a deep dive on the Supreme Court’s tort cases. To begin, we’ll consider whether there is any relationship between the party which won at the Court of Appeal and the result at the Supreme Court in tort cases for the years 1990 through 1999.
We begin with
On Thursday, September 16, Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar announced he will be leaving the Court effective Friday, October 29, to become President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said in a statement that Justice Cuéllar’s “legal intellect, academic training, and life experiences brought an essential perspective to California’s highest court.” See
As shown in Table 1591, the percentage of the Court’s criminal docket accounted for by final judgments and death penalty appeals remained quite high throughout the years 2010-2020. In 2010, 60.27% of the docket was either from final judgments or death cases. That rose into the seventies from 2011 to 2013 before falling back a
For the past two weeks, we’ve been comparing the data for appeals from final judgments to the Court’s total caseload, addressing the notion that the Court is reluctant to get involved in cases which have not yet reached final judgment. This time, we’re looking at the civil docket for the years 2010 through 2020.
The
Between 2000 and 2009, the share of the Court’s criminal docket accounted for by non-death final judgments edged downwards, from 47.27% in 2000 and 55.17% in 2001 to 34.43% in 2005 and only 26.23% in 2007.
A large part of the reason for that was the increase in death penalty cases. When we add the
During the years 2000 through 2009, the percentage of the Supreme Court’s drifted down slightly. The decade high came in 2000, when 75.51% of the Court’s civil cases were from final judgments. That share fell seventeen points in 2001 before recovering a bit to 64.58% in 2002. In 2004, 60.38% of the civil docket were
So what percentage of criminal cases arise from final judgments? This time, we’re reviewing the data from the years 1990 through 1999. Since a substantial fraction of the court’s criminal cases come from death penalty appeals, we include both final judgments and death penalty cases.
Between 1990 and 1992, the percentage of final judgments in
We’ve all heard it any number of times: the appellate courts only review final judgments. Even if you can figure out a theory to take a non-final judgment up, the appellate courts won’t decide it on the grounds that it isn’t necessary – let it percolate out, and maybe the case will settle, or the
From 2010 to 2020, a dissenter at the Court of Appeal was a very strong indicator that reversal was likely in criminal cases at the Supreme Court. Overall, divided decisions were reversed at nearly double the rate of unanimous ones: 75.51% to 41.48%. Divided decisions were more likely to be reversed than unanimous ones in