Last week, we looked at whether the level of disagreement on the Illinois Supreme Court affects the average number of questions at oral argument. Today, we begin our analysis of the central question addressed in most of the previous scholarship: does the losing side tend to get the most questions?
For the entire period from
Yesterday, we addressed the data on average questions asked to each side by the Illinois Supreme Court in unanimous and non-unanimous cases. We concluded that there was no evidence that disagreement on the Court had a consistent effect in either direction on the total number of questions.
But of course, “non-unanimous” is an aggregate statistic,
Last week, we began our analysis of questioning patterns on the Court by addressing the most basic question of all: which side gets the most questions? Today, we address a related question: does it matter if there is disagreement on the Court?
Certain theories about the role of oral argument in appellate decision making would
Today, we begin our analysis of the questioning patterns in civil cases at the Illinois Supreme Court.
But first, a few ground rules to govern our inquiry. Data is always assigned to the year in which the case was decided, not the date of its argument. Therefore, the data for 2008 will always be incomplete,
Today, we begin the second phase of our empirical study of the Illinois Supreme Court’s civil decision making – a data analytic look at the Court’s oral arguments. For this addition to the Supreme Court database, we reviewed the videotapes on the Court’s website of all 233 oral arguments in civil cases from January 1,
Last week, we began our study of the voting patterns on the Illinois Supreme Court between 2010 and 2014 by considering the agreement rates between the Justices in non-unanimous civil cases. Now we turn to a different aspect of the issue: the question of swing votes on the Court.
For most of the period, the
Yesterday, we addressed swing voter patterns at the Illinois Supreme Court between 2005 and 2009. Today, we turn to agreement rates between the Justices during the final five years of our study period, 2010 to 2014.
The Court’s unanimity rate between 2010 and today presents us with a bit of a conundrum. In 2010 and
With one seat on the Court switching from Democratic to Republican hands as a result of the 2004 election, a centrist majority of Chief Justice Thomas, Garman and Karmeier began to emerge, often joined by Justice Fitzgerald. As a result, with the exception of 2006 (when the unanimity rate abruptly dipped to 57.4%), the Court
Yesterday, we turned from examining the sources of the Court’s docket to looking at what the data tells us about the Court’s decision-making process. There, we determined that the Court’s overall lag time has been relatively constant for at least ten years. When the Court hands down a decision in three to four months, the
For the past several weeks, we’ve been investigating what the data tells us about how the Illinois Supreme Court assembles its docket: whether the Court prefers final judgments; how often the Court takes up summary judgments; what counties and areas of the law have contributed most to the Court’s civil docket; whether a dissent at