This time, we’re looking at the percentage of civil cases in which each of the Justices who served during the years 2010-2020 voted with the majority. Although the Court’s unanimity rate has been fairly steady with the exception of a brief two-year dip during this period, this will help illuminate which Justices drove any disagreement
In this post and the next, we’re concluding our review of the Court’s unanimity rate in civil cases set against changes in the Court’s party alignment.
Despite changes in four of the Court’s seven seats during these eleven years, the party alignment of the Court remained the same throughout – four Democrats, three Republicans. As
This week, we’re tracking the Supreme Court’s unanimity rate in civil cases, matched against the evolving party alignment of the Justices. Last time, we reviewed the data for the 1990s. Today, we’re reviewing the data for the years 2001 through 2010.
With Democrat Thomas Kilbride having replaced James Heiple in the final days of 2000,
This week we’re looking at an issue related to our discussion of panel effects: has the unanimity rate on the Court been impacted by shifts in the party alignment of the Justices?
For the entire decade of the 1990s, the Court consisted of four Democratic Justices and three Republicans. Although none of the changes affected
With this post, we begin our short review of some of the academic literature regarding panel effects.
Of course, the first question one encounters when taking a case before an appellate court is how one’s panel will be chosen. A majority of appellate courts state, either in their operating procedures or their rules, that appellate
This week, we’re taking a short break from our usual number-heavy analysis for another glance at some of the vast academic literature on the analytic-driven analysis of appellate decision making. This is a four-part post – two here and two over at the California Supreme Court Review – sampling some of the literature on “panel
Today, we’re reviewing the contents of our database, which includes every case decided by the Illinois Supreme Court since January 17, 1990. For every case, we’ve captured the following data points:
Official Reporter Citation
Docket Number
Case Name
Petitioner
Petitioner Governmental Entity (Y/N)
Respondent Governmental Entity (Y/N)
Source of Appellate Jurisdiction
Originating
Last time, we began our analysis by addressing the competing theories of judicial behavior. Formalism, the oldest theory, teaches that judicial decision making can be explained and predicted based upon the facts, the applicable law and precedent and judicial deliberations – and nothing more. But if formalism explains all of judicial decision making, then many
Our latest repost:
We begin our analysis by addressing the foundation of the entire body of data analytic scholarship on appellate judging: competing theories of judicial decision making.
The oldest theory by far is generally known in the literature as “formalism.” This is the theory we all learned in law school, according to which every
Our short series of contextual reposts continues:
Although the state Supreme Courts have not attracted anything near the level of study from academics engaged in empirical legal studies that the U.S. Supreme Courts and Federal Circuits have a number of different researchers have attempted to compare how influential the various state courts are for the