This is part 2 in a series of posts reviewing the dockets at the Court of Appeal for the past thirty-plus years and their impact on the work of the Supreme Court. This time, we review the data for newly filed original writ proceedings.
We showed last time that Notices of Appeal declined between 1996
Today we’re beginning a series of posts examining the declining dockets at the Court of Appeal and assessing the impact on the Supreme Court’s work.
Below, we report the District-by-District new Notices of Appeal numbers (civil, criminal and juvenile) for the years 1996 through 2000. All data comes from the California Courts Court Statistics Reports,
The Fourth District is almost equally divided between three counties – San Diego (29.28%), Orange (28.29%) and Riverside (21.47%). San Bernardino County accounts for 19.37% of the population and Imperial County is 1.6%.
San Diego County had 24 cases for the decade, sending cases to the Supreme Court’s civil docket in nine of ten years.
Finally, we reach the final part of this second series of our multi-part post on the geographic origins of the Court’s civil docket.
Santa Clara accounts for 72.45% of the population in the counties with cases on the civil docket in the 00s. Monterey was 16.88% and Santa Cruz was 10.67%.
Santa Clara had cases
With this post, we proceed to the Fifth District’s population and case distribution statistics.
Fresno is the biggest county, with 29.16% of the Fifth’s population. Following that are Kern County at 26.31%, Stanislaus at 16.12% and Tulare at 13.86%. Merced has 8.02% of the population, Kings County accounts for 4.79% and Tuolumne County is 1.74%.
As shown in the Table, the population in the Third District is largely concentrated in two counties – Sacramento (51.38%) and San Joaquin (24.82%). Behind them, Yolo County is 7.27%, El Dorado is 6.56%, Shasta County is 6.42% and Sutter County is 6.42%. According to the 2010 census, Sierra County had 3,240 people – 0.12%
This time, we’re reviewing the data for the Second District.
Of course, Los Angeles County continued to dominate between 2000 and 2009, with 86.62% of the population among counties that produced Supreme Court cases. Ventura County was 7.26%, Santa Barbara was 3.74% and San Luis Obispo was 2.38%.
The case distribution was even more lopsided
We begin part 2 of our review of the geographic origin of the civil docket by reviewing the population distribution among First District counties which accounted for cases between 2000 and 2009. Alameda had 27.69% of the District population. Contra Costa County was 19.23%. San Francisco was 14.76% and San Mateo County was 13.17%. Sonoma
Like the Second District, the Sixth District is dominated by one county, Santa Clara. Santa Clara County accounts for 70.31% of the population. Monterey is 16.79%, Santa Cruz County is 10.68% and San Benito County accounts for 2.22% of the District.
Given this data, the caseload is not surprisingly almost entirely from Santa Clara County.
As of the end of the nineties, the population of the Fifth District was 2,092,011. Fresno County accounted for 38.21% of that, Kern County was 31.63% and Stanislaus County was 21.37%. Kings County had 6.19% of the population and Tuolumne accounted for 2.61%.
The Supreme Court reviewed relatively few cases from the Fifth District between