The Petition for Review

A few posts ago, I noted that analytics research has demonstrated a correlation between the length of majority opinions and the rate of unanimous opinions – shorter opinions, more unanimity; longer opinions and less unanimity.  So what happened for civil cases between 1990 and 1999?

As we noted a few posts ago, majority opinions were

Today, we’re reviewing the Supreme Court’s criminal docket during the 1990s – were total caseloads declining and was the Court writing longer opinions?

For the decade, the Court decided 523 criminal cases.  The Court filed 17,588 pages of majority opinion, and average of 33.63 pages per case – half again longer than the average civil

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,

Turning finally to the Sixth District, according to the 2020 census, Santa Clara County was 73.17% of the population.  Monterey County accounted for 16.59% of the population among the three counties contributing cases to the docket and Santa Cruz was 10.24%.

Santa Clara County had cases on the Supreme Court’s civil docket in seven of