Earlier this week at the Illinois Supreme Court Review, we began an intensive review of the Court’s caseload, one area of law at a time. We began with the area of law most closely identified with courts of last resort – constitutional law. Let’s start our review of the Court’s decisions with the civil
Last time, we analyzed the data on lag times in civil cases – grant of review to oral argument and argument to decision – to determine whether lag time is correlated with the result in the case: do affirmances or reversals take longer? We determined that there’s no consistent relationship over time between lag time
Last week, we compared lag times in the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision making – grant of review to argument and argument to decision – to the ultimate result in the case, analyzing whether lag time is correlated to the result. The answer is yes – for the most part, affirmances take longer to go from
Last time, we reviewed the lag time data – grant of review to oral argument, and oral argument to decision – for the Court’s civil cases between 1993 and 2017. Now, we’re turning our attention to the criminal docket.
Lag times for the criminal docket as a whole are skewed, of course, by the death
Last time, we were reviewing the data on the Court’s record with Court of Appeal cases that sparked a dissent below. This week, we’re addressing the controversial topic of appellate delays – both from the grant of review to oral argument, and from argument to decision.
We report the data for the years 1993 through
Yesterday, we reviewed the year by year data, studying whether Court of Appeal cases with a dissenter were more often reversed than unanimous decisions. Today, we’re studying the Court’s criminal cases.
The answer for criminal cases is clear: yes, cases with a dissent are more likely to be reversed than unanimous decisions, generally by a
Last week, we reviewed the data on whether cases published at the Court of Appeal are more frequently reversed by the Supreme Court. This week, we’re reviewing a similar question: are cases with a dissent at the Court of Appeal systematically more likely to be reversed at the Supreme Court?
For two-thirds of the years
Last week, we looked at the data on how prevalent unpublished Court of Appeal opinions are in the Court’s civil and criminal dockets. Yesterday, we looked at a related question: are published Court of Appeal opinions in civil cases reversed by the Supreme Court at a consistently higher (or lower) rate than unpublished decisions are?
Last week, we tracked the yearly data as to how high a portion of the Court’s docket on both the civil and criminal sides consisted of published decisions from the Court of Appeal. This week, we’re analyzing another aspect of the difference between published and unpublished Court of Appeal decisions. Are decisions which were published
Yesterday, we reviewed the year-by-year data, looking at how much of the Court’s civil docket is cases which were published at the Court of Appeal. We found that fairly consistently for the past twenty-four years, the Court has averaged between sixty and eighty percent of its civil docket in published cases.
It’s a very different