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
Yesterday, we addressed the reversal rates of the districts and divisions of the Appellate Court. Now we turn to a related issue.
Reversal rates may conceal the true degree of disagreement on the Court with the decisions coming out of any particular District and division. Reversal is a binary variable: a 4-3 reversal affects a
Last week, we addressed the dissent rate in civil cases at the Illinois Supreme Court. This week, we turn to a new aspect of the Court’s decision making.
During the past twenty years, the most frequently cited statistic among observers of the United States Supreme Court has been the “reversal rate” of each federal Circuit.
Yesterday, we addressed the Illinois Supreme Court’s rate of dissent in civil cases since 2000. But a 6-1 decision counts as not being unanimous – how many of these cases saw a closely divided Court?
The Court’s percentage of closely divided cases – decisions with two or three dissenting Justices – has remained relatively constant
Last week, we addressed the issue of the lag time between argument and decision as a predictor of whether the Court’s decision will be unanimous. This week, we address the Court’s dissent rate.
Many scholars (and quite a few judges) have argued that an appellate court’s dissent rate does not necessarily reflect how often the
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
I thought we’d interrupt our ongoing discussion of the Illinois Supreme Court’s modern history across the whole of its docket to focus on a major event at the Court coming up this week: Wednesday afternoon’s oral argument in In re Pension Reform Litigation.
First, a bit of background for anyone who hasn’t been following