Last week, we finished comparing where in the state the Supreme Court’s civil and criminal dockets have been drawn from between 2000 and 2015. Today, we begin a new subject, comparing the two dockets by the area of law involved.
In Table 190 below, we report the data for the two leading areas of law
Originally published on Law360, Feb. 3, 2016. Posted with permission.
For the past three years, we’ve taken a close statistical look at the previous year’s decisions from the Illinois Supreme Court to see what insights could be gained about the justices’ voting patterns and decision making dynamics. (View the 2012 analysis here, 2013
Last week, we continued our look at the question patterns in civil cases at the Illinois Supreme Court by analyzing whether there’s a higher-than-random likelihood that the Justice asking the first question to either side is writing the majority opinion.
Today, we continue our analysis with a somewhat different issue: do the Justices tend to
For the last two weeks, we’ve been taking an intensive look at reversal rates before the Illinois Supreme Court, disaggregated by areas of law, for the past fifteen years.
We turn finally to the 2010-2014 period – with the exception of Chief Justice Thomas Fitzgerald’s ten-month service in 2010, the tenure of the current seven
Yesterday, we began a close look at the reversal rates in the Illinois Supreme Court’s civil docket between 2005 and 2009. Now, we turn to the central question: what were the Court’s reversal rates in its most common areas of the law for liberal and conservative Appellate Court decisions?
Despite the more equal distribution of
Last week, we began to take a close look at the reversal rates of the Illinois Supreme Court, disaggregated by area of the law, for the first five years of our study period.
How did things change during the next five years, after the Court’s party balance had shifted from five Democrats and two Republicans
In our last post, we saw that tort law was the most common subject on the Court’s civil docket in the first five years of the twenty-first century, followed by civil procedure, constitutional law, insurance law, domestic relations, workers compensation and government and administrative law. We begin the next phase of our analysis by addressing
Last week, we addressed the reversal rate of the Appellate Court districts in civil cases at the Illinois Supreme Court.
Today, we begin taking a closer look at the data. Even viewed from the District-by-District level, Appellate Court reversal rates are a composite statistic, and therefore may be hiding important insights. Suppose, for example, that
In our last post, we continued our examination of the legal issues appearing on the Illinois Supreme Court’s civil docket, examining the period 2005-2009.
Turning to the final five years of our study period, we see tort cases slightly down in absolute terms. Government/administrative and constitutional law cases are down on the Court’s civil docket,
In our last post, we began our consideration of the areas of law covered by the Illinois Supreme Court’s civil docket between 2000 and 2004. We found that torts, civil procedure and government/administrative cases led the Court’s docket, although the Court also showed a significant interest in constitutional and workers’ compensation law. We now turn