Photo of Kirk Jenkins

Kirk Jenkins brings a wealth of experience to his appellate practice, which focuses on antitrust and constitutional law, as well as products liability, RICO, price fixing, information sharing among competitors and class certification. In addition to handling appeals, he also regularly works with trial teams to ensure that important issues are properly presented and preserved for appellate review.  Mr. Jenkins is a pioneer in the application of data analytics to appellate decision-making and writes two analytics blogs, the California Supreme Court Review and the Illinois Supreme Court Review, as well as regularly writing for various legal publications.

Last time, we showed that between 1990 and 1999, as majority opinions in civil cases got substantially shorter, unanimity became significantly more common.  What about the criminal docket?

The effect on the criminal side of the docket was even more noticeable.

In 1990, the average majority opinion in a criminal case was 25.97 pages.  By

Today, we’re looking at the data for the criminal docket at the Supreme Court during the 1990s – specifically (1) the total caseload; (2) the total number of pages of majority opinions written and (3) the average length of the Court’s majority opinions in criminal cases.

For the entire decade, the Court decided 611 cases. 

Today we’re beginning a series of posts examining the declining dockets at the Appellate Court and assessing the impact on the Supreme Court’s work.

Below, we report the District-by-District new filings numbers for civil cases, 1997-2000 (all data comes from the Illinois Courts Annual Report Statistical Summaries – we begin with 1997 because that’s as