In our last post, we began looking at the sources of appellate jurisdiction on the Illinois Supreme Court’s civil docket. Does the Court mostly review final decisions? If the Court frequently hears interlocutory appeals on its civil docket, does it show a preference for any particular kind of interlocutory appeal – constitutional cases or appeals from injunctions – over other cases?
For the initial five years of our study, we concluded that Rule 301 appeals – appeals from final civil judgments – comprise between sixty and seventy percent of the Court’s civil docket. The remainder of the Court’s docket was relatively stable from year to year.
In the second half of the decade, Rule 301 appeals remained at a relatively constant level, while purely interlocutory appeals – Rules 306, 307 and 308 proceedings – drifted downwards as a percentage of the Court’s civil docket:
In our next post, we’ll look at the appellate jurisdiction for the Court’s docket in the most recent five year period of our study, 2010-2014.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Patrick Feller (no changes).