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

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. 

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%