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Last week, we looked at the data on how prevalent unpublished Court of Appeal opinions are in the Court’s civil and criminal dockets.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Court of Appeal opinions in civil cases reversed by the Supreme Court at a consistently higher (or lower) rate than unpublished decisions are?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 This week, we’re analyzing another aspect of the difference between published and unpublished Court of Appeal decisions.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
Last time, we were evaluating how much of the Court’s civil and criminal dockets came from divided Court of Appeal decisions, and whether decisions with a dissenter typically took longer to decide at the Supreme Court level. This week, we’re looking at a new issue – how much of the Court’s docket is accounted for
Yesterday, we asked whether the Court’s civil cases with a dissent below take longer to decide, charting divided and unanimous cases against the number of days from grant of review to scheduling of oral argument. Today, we’re looking at the criminal docket.
We can see from Table 421 below that the answer to the question
For the past several weeks, we’ve been comparing the data on cases which were decided unanimously at the Court of Appeal level to cases which had a dissent. This week, we’re considering another question: do divided cases from the Court of Appeal take longer to decide? Today, we’re looking at the Court’s civil docket.
In
Yesterday, we looked at the year-by-year data on the civil side, asking whether the presence of a dissent at the Court of Appeal level is reliably correlated with one or more dissenters at the Supreme Court level. Today, we’re turning our attention to the criminal side of the docket.
In Table 418, we compare the
Last time, we tested the often-heard view that a case which didn’t have a dissenter at the Court of Appeal has no chance of getting Supreme Court review. This week, we’re testing a different correlation for dissent below – does it help predict dissent at the Supreme Court? One would think the answer might be