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Yesterday, we showed that between 2000 and 2004, the Illinois Supreme Court reviewed more liberal Appellate Court decisions than conservative ones in most areas of the civil law.  Today, we address the question left unanswered by that analysis: how does the Court’s reversal rate vary among areas of the law, depending on whether the Appellate Court decision was liberal or conservative?

As we see below, the Court’s reversal rate tended to vary considerably, based on whether the Court is reviewing a liberal or conservative Appellate Court decision.  Although the Court had one more Democratic member during these years than it has since, the Court reversed 62.17% of liberal tort decisions and only 36.84% of conservative ones.  In constitutional law, the Court reversed half of all liberal decisions, but only 28.57% of conservative ones.  But in all the other major areas, the effect was reversed.  The reversal rate on liberal decisions in government and administrative law was 50%, while the reversal rate of conservative decisions was 61.54%.  The reversal rate for liberal decisions in civil procedure was 58.33%, while 64.71% of conservative civil procedure decisions were reversed.  The Court reversed half of all liberal workers compensation decisions, but 60% of conservative ones.  The reversal rate for liberal decisions in insurance law was 50%, while 80% of all conservative insurance law decisions were reversed.  Just over half – 54.55% – of liberal domestic relations decisions were reversed, while three-quarters of conservative ones fell.

Table 306

Join us back here next week as we turn to the criminal docket for the years 2000-2004.  In the coming weeks, we’ll compare results on both sides of the docket for the years 2005 to 2009, and 2010 to 2015.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Roman Boed (no changes).

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been analyzing the Illinois Supreme Court’s civil and criminal dockets, looking at the performance of individual Districts of the Appellate Court.  Now, we’ll disaggregate the data divided into areas of the law and ask two questions: (1) Does the Court tend to take more liberal or conservative Appellate Court decisions in certain areas of the law; and (2) Does the Court reverse either liberal or conservative decisions at a higher rate?  We’ll compare our results both over time on the two sides of the docket, and between the civil and criminal sides.

We touched on the issue of ideological coding of appellate decisions a few weeks ago over at the California Supreme Court Review in our post about formalism, realism and attitudinalism as theories of judicial behavior.  Although the idea has long been controversial, ideological coding of appellate decisions has been widespread among empirical students of appellate decision making at least since C. Herman Pritchett’s classic The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1937-1947.  That literature has revealed a host of important insights for better understanding and predicting appellate decision making.

Because our primary goal here is to develop insights about the Court’s handling of the underlying cases (and to avoid adding subjectivity to the data), we adopt a default rule, coding decisions for the defendant as conservative and decisions for the plaintiff as liberal.  Where a party which typically appears as the defendant happens to be in a case as the plaintiff – such as an insurer bringing a declaratory judgment action rather than awaiting a coverage suit – we nevertheless code that party as the conservative position.  The government’s side in an enforcement action is coded as liberal.  Where a party is suing the government for being insufficiently rigorous in its enforcement, the plaintiff is coded as liberal, but where the plaintiff argues that the government is overreaching, we code the government’s position as liberal.

First, let’s revisit the composition of the civil docket between 2000 and 2004.  In Table 304, we report the percentage of the docket accounted for by each area of the law.  Tort is the mainstay of the Court’s civil docket at 24.07%.  Only two other subjects account for even ten percent of the caseload – government and administrative at 14.11% and civil procedure at 12.03%.  Constitutional law made up 8.71% of the civil docket.  Domestic relations accounted for 7.88%, insurance was 6.22%, and 4.98% of the Court’s caseload arose from workers’ compensation.  Property law, once the dominant area in the Court’s docket, was only 3.32% of the civil docket.  Another 2.9% of the docket involved tax law.  Surprisingly, contracts and employment law amounted to only 2.49% and 2.07%, respectively.  Three additional areas were between one and two percent of the docket – wills and estates (1.66%), public employee pensions (1.66%), arbitration and consumer law (1.24% each).  Other areas were below one percent – election law, environmental law, redistricting, secured transactions, trusts and construction.

Table 304

But does the Court incline towards reviewing more liberal or conservative decisions in these areas?  We divided each area of the law into liberal and conservative Appellate Court decisions (dropping out the occasional certified questions from the Seventh Circuit).  In Table 305 below, we report the percentage of the Court’s docket in that area of the law which involved a liberal decision from the Appellate Court.  (In other words, if the Court reviewed six liberal decisions and four conservative ones in a particular area, we would report a 60% below).

In fifteen different areas of the law, more than half of the Court’s civil docket between 2000 and 2004 came from liberal decisions of the Appellate Court.  In some cases, such as contract, redistricting and election law, this is misleading, since the Court heard very few cases.  But that list includes most of the Court’s most frequently heard areas of the law, including tort (66.08% liberal), government and administrative (58.07%), domestic relations (57.89%) and constitutional (58.82%).  Among the mainstays of the Court’s civil docket, only civil procedure (41.38%) and workers compensation (44.44%) involved less than half liberal Appellate Court decisions.

Table 305

Join us back here tomorrow and we’ll address the Court’s reversal rate, area by area, of liberal and conservative Appellate Court decisions.

Image courtesy of Flickr by John Bauder (no changes).

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Yesterday, we reviewed “true” reversal rates for each District of the Appellate Court in civil cases before the Illinois Supreme Court since 2007 – which we defined as the cases reversed by the Supreme Court divided by the total number of cases disposed of by the Court, both on the merits and in PLAs.  Today, we turn to the criminal side of the docket.

True reversal rates have been quite low in recent years in the First District (the source of a large portion of the Court’s criminal docket).  The rate was 1.42% in 2007 and 2008, 2.48% in 2009, 1.21% in 2010 and 1.19% in 2011.  In 2012, the true reversal rate fell even further, to 0.78%.  The rate rose to 2.56% the following year, but was back down in 2014, at only 0.73%.  The true reversal rate in the First District was 1.39% last year.

On the other hand, the rate of denials with supervisory orders has been all over the map.  The Court issued such orders in 17.24% of cases disposed of in 2007.  The rate fell below 5% the next two years before rising back to 11.36% in 2010.  Since then, the rate of supervisory orders has gradually declined – to 8.72% in 2011, 3.45% in 2012, 1.77% in 2013, 5.32% in 2014 and 2.38% last year.

Table 299

The true reversal rate has been quite low in the Second District throughout our nine-year period.  The rate was over 4% only twice – at 4.10% in 2008 and 4.12% in 2010.  The rate was 3.10% in 2007.  The true reversal rate has been virtually nothing every other year – below 1% in 2009 and from 2012 to 2014, and only 2.68% in 2015.  The rate of supervisory orders from the Second was somewhat high from 2009 through 2011 (6.61%, 6.47% and 5.67%, respectively), but has been below 2% from 2012 through 2015 (as well as in 2008).

Table 300

On balance, true reversal rates in the Third District have been higher on the criminal docket than anywhere else in the state.  The rate was 6.67% in 2008, 5.04% in 2010, and 4.26% in 2012.  The rate was 3.97% in 2011 and 3.96% in 2013.  The rate of supervisory orders was comparatively high in the first half of the period – 7.57% in 2007, 6.67% in 2008, 6.47% in 2010 and 6.35% in 2011 – but has declined recently, to 1.98%, 1.08% and 1.1% in the past three years.

Table 301

True reversal rates in the Fourth District have been low almost throughout our period.  The rate was below 3% from 2007-2010 and 2012-2014, and only rose to 4.12% in 2015.  The true reversal rate for the Fourth District was below 1% in 2007, 2010 and 2013-2014 (0.63%, 0, 0.64%, 0.85%, respectively).  The rate of supervisory orders rose to 12.14% in 2009, 8.33% in 2010 and 4.03% in 2011.  In most other years, the rate of supervisory orders for the criminal docket in the Fourth District has been between three and five percent.

Table 302

Criminal cases from the Fifth District are comparatively rare on the Court’s docket, which partially explains the true reversal rate of zero between 2007 and 2010.  In 2011, the rate “rose” to 1.35%, before dropping back to zero the following year.  In the most recent three years, the true reversal rate has been 2.5%, 6.25% and 2.22%.  The rate of supervisory orders, on the other hand, has been comparable to the rest of the state.  The rate was between four and six percent between 2007 and 2010 (4.55%, 5.77%, 4.41% and 4.76%, respectively), before falling somewhat in the years since to 3.13% in 2014 and 2.22% in 2015.

Table 303

Join us back here next Tuesday morning as we turn to another phase of our analysis.

Image courtesy of Flickr by James Willamor (no changes).

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In the past several weeks, we’ve been looking at the Illinois Supreme Court’s reversal rates of the Districts of the Appellate Court, and at how the Districts have fared in the past nine years with the Court’s handling of petitions for leave to appeal.

Today, we combine all that work into a new measure – the “true” reversal rate.  Virtually everyone reports the fraction of cases a Supreme Court hears on the merits and reverses as the District or Circuit’s “reversal rate.”  But as we’ve commented before, it’s a somewhat unfair statistic. Even for the intermediate courts with the highest reversal rates, the vast majority of cases which litigants ask the Supreme Court to review are turned away.

We derived the statistics below by aggregating each District’s output, year by year, into the possible outcomes – PLA denied, PLA denied with a supervisory order, PLA granted and affirmed, PLA granted and reversed.  The true reversal rate is the number of cases reversed on the merits divided by the total number of cases acted upon by the Court from that District during the year.  Since denial with a supervisory order generally suggests some level of disagreement with the District’s resolution of the case, we also report a second number below – the number of denials with a supervisory order divided by the total number of cases disposed of.

We report the true reversal rates in civil cases for the First District in Table 294.  Although measured solely in terms of cases decided on the merits, most Districts are reversed forty to sixty percent of the time, we see below that the true reversal rate is microscopic.  In 2007, only 3.89% of all First District civil cases acted upon by the Court were reversed on the merits. The number dipped a bit in 2008 (2.92%) and 2009 (3.08%) before rising back to almost the same level in 2010 and 2011 (3.86% and 3.88%, respectively).  The true reversal rate had a one-year spike in 2012, rising to 5.73%, before settling in between 2.5% and 4% each year since.

The rate of supervisory orders wasn’t much higher.  In 2007, 4.67% of all cases disposed of resulted in supervisory orders.  The rate was between 2% and 3% until 2012, when it rose back to 4.12%.  Supervisories dipped to below 2% in 2013 and 2014, before rising back to 3.77% last year.

Table 294

The true reversal rate in the Second District has been slightly less stable.  In 2007, it was comparable to the First District’s experience – 3.85% of all cases disposed of were merits reversals.  That number rose to a little above 7% in 2008 and 2009 (7.32% and 7.14%), before falling to almost nothing – 1.09% – in 2010.  The true reversal rate was 3.92% in 2011, 6% in 2012, 3.53% in 2013 and 3.85% in 2014.  The rate declined only slightly, to 3.61%, in 2015.

Supervisory orders were quite rare in civil cases rising from the Second District.  In 2007, 2.56% of all cases disposed of resulted in supervisory orders. That number was halved the next year, to only 1.22%. Supervisory orders were more common in 2009 – 5.71% of the cases – but have been almost nil in the years since.

Table 295

As reflected in Table 296 below, true reversal rates in the Third District’s civil cases were somewhat higher than in the First or Second.  In both 2007 and 2015, 6.12% of all cases disposed of were merits reversals.  The rate was at 5.88% in 2009 and 4.44% in 2012 and 2013, and between 3% and 4% in 2008, 2010 and 2011.  The rate of supervisory orders was roughly comparable to the First District – 5.89% in 2009, 4.44% in 2012, and between 1.5% and 2.5% every other year (except 2007, when the rate was 0%).

Table 296

True reversal rates began somewhat high in the Fourth District for the years 2007-2009 (4.69%, 6.25% and 4.29%, respectively).  However, the rate has been much lower for the most part in the years since, staying between 1% and 2% from 2010-2012 and in 2015.  The true reversal rate in the Fourth spiked in 2013, rising to 8 45%, before receding to 3.03% in 2014.  The rate of denials with supervisory orders was similarly somewhat high in 2007 and 2008, at 4.69% and 3.75%, respectively.  But since then, it’s settled down to between 1% and 2% every year (except 2013 and 2015, when the rate was zero).

Table 297

Finally, we turn to the true reversal rates in the Fifth District.  Based solely on the civil cases heard by the Supreme Court on the merits, the Fifth District nearly always leads the state in reversal rates.  But we see below that the true reversal rate tells quite a different story.  For 2007, the true reversal rate was only 1.45%.  The next year, it was 2.47%.  The rate rose to 11.67% in 2009, but fell to 4.76% in 2010 and 2.9% the following year.  For 2012, the true reversal rate was 9.38%, but the following year, it was nearly nothing – only 0.89% of the cases disposed of resulted in merits reversals.  The rate has increased somewhat in the past two years, to 4.44% in 2014 and 7.25% in 2015.

Table 298

Join us back here tomorrow as we review the true reversal rates for the criminal side of the docket.

Image courtesy of Flickr by StantonTCady (no changes).

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Yesterday, we looked at whether the rate at which the Illinois Supreme Court grants petitions for leave to appeal differs significantly depending on the time of year.  We showed that it does – the Court’s overall grant rate tends to be lower in the fall than in the spring, and at its lowest during the September term.  Today, we look at the PLA data in another way and ask – does the term effect vary from one District of the Appellate Court to another?

In fact, a PLA’s chances do vary significantly during the year depending on the District, and not solely in a way that mirrors the statewide trends we discussed yesterday.  In Table 290, we report the grant rate for civil PLAs, divided by term (to make the chart easier to follow, we ignore for these purposes the off-term months).  Although the statewide grant rate tends to be lower in the fall, in fact the rate for First District civil cases is the highest of all during the November term – 7.34%.  Nearly as many are granted in March – 6.35% – and May – 6.98%.  During the Court’s busiest month of September, 4.99% of civil PLAs from the First District are granted.  The hardest term to bring a civil PLA from the First District is January, when only 4.86% are granted.

On the other hand, January is the second-best term to be coming from the Second District, with 8.45% of civil PLAs granted.  The Court has granted 8.62% in March.  The Second’s grant rate in November is almost exactly what the First District’s was – 7.43% of civil PLAs.  The most difficult time of the year to be coming from the Second District is late spring and early fall.  During May, the Court has granted 5.6% of civil PLAs from the Second, and only 5.65% during September.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth Districts tend to mirror the statewide trends more closely.  The best month to be coming from the Third District is March, with 10.91% of civil PLAs granted.  May is only a bit behind, with 9.09% granted, and 8.45% are granted in January.  The grant rate for the remaining two terms is sharply lower – the Court grants only 5.21% of civil PLAs from the Third in November, and only 4.93% in September.

March is also preferable for petitioners coming from the Fourth District, with the Court granting 9.64% of civil PLAs.  The grant rate for May term PLAs is 7.21%, and the Court grants 6.67% in January.  The worst month of all to arrive from the Fourth District is November (the best month to be from the First), with a grant rate of only 5.21%.  September, on the other hand, was almost indistinguishable from May for civil PLAs coming from the Fourth – 7.22% were granted.

The biggest term impact of all was in the Fifth District.  The fall was a more difficult time for civil PLAs arising from the Fifth District, with the Court granting only 4.92% in September and 3.91% in November.  But the spring terms varied substantially for PLAs from the Fifth.  The Court granted 10.47% of civil PLAs from the Fifth in January.  But only 6.8% were granted in May.  March was the hardest month for civil PLAs from the Fifth District (and the lowest grant rate of any term for any District) – the Court granted only 1.56% of all civil PLAs from the Fifth District in March.

Table 290

We turn to the data for criminal PLAs in Table 291 below.  We find almost no term effect at all on criminal PLAs from the First District; the Court granted between two and three percent in every term of the year.  The term made more of a difference elsewhere in the State, though.  May was the best month for the Second District, with 5.96% of criminal PLAs granted.  March was second, with 4.48% grants.  The worst month for the Second District was November, when only 2.98% of criminal PLAs were granted (however, that was still a higher grant rate than the First District had in any term).  The term made a substantial difference for the Third District too.  In May, 7.36% of criminal PLAs from the Third were granted, and 7.43% were granted in November.  The grant rate fell to 5.81% in March.  The hardest month for the Third District was January term, when only 4.55% of criminal PLAs were granted.  September was only a little better, with a grant rate of 4.72%.

Late spring was the best time to bring a criminal PLA from the Fourth District.  January and November were roughly equal – 3.51% granted in January term, 3.57% in November – but the Court granted 4.8% in March and 4.68% in May.  The Court’s busiest month, September, was the roughest month for the Fourth District, with only 2.84% of criminal PLAs granted.  Just as was the case on the civil side, grant rates for the Fifth District show a greater term effect than anywhere else in the state.  January, March and September are more or less equivalent for the Fifth District, with grant rates of 3.49%, 3.57% and 3.09% respectively.  But grant rates sunk to almost nothing in May and November.  The Court granted 0.91% of criminal PLAs from the Fifth in May and only 0.93% in November – by far the lowest grant rates in the state for any District by term.

Table 291

With the exception of March, when 5.29% of civil PLAs from the First District were denied with a supervisory order, the rate on supervisory orders was flat for the First throughout the year.  Supervisory orders were rarer for the Second District, with 3.2% in May, less than 2% in March and November, and less than 1% in January and September.  The Third District varied substantially, with 7.27% of civil PLAs denied with supervisory orders in March and 4.23% in January, as compared to only 2.82% in September, 1% in November and none at all in May.  The Fourth District was fairly flat – 4.42% of civil PLAs drew supervisory orders in May, but the rate was between 0 and 2% the rest of the year.

Supervisory orders were more common for civil cases in the Fifth District than anywhere else in the State.  In March, 10.94% of civil PLAs from the Fifth drew such orders.  The numbers were nearly as high in May – 9.71% – and November, at 8.59%.  January was down for the Fifth, although at 6.98%, it was still quite high compared to the rest of the state.  Only 3.83% of civil PLAs from the Fifth brought supervisory orders during the September term.

Table 292

Finally, we turn to the rate of supervisory orders in criminal PLAs.  Once again, we see evidence of at least a moderate term effect.  Supervisory orders were more common in March than any other time of year for the First District (just as was true on the civil side), with 14.59% of PLAs drawing orders.  The rate was only half that in January and September – 7.56% and 6.13%, respectively.  Such orders were comparatively scarce in May (3.48%) and November (2.43%).  March was the heaviest month for the Second District too, with 7.46% of criminal PLAs drawing supervisory orders.  Another 5.94% received orders during the January term.  The rate dropped sharply the rest of the year: 2.29% in May, 2.05% in September, and only 1.7% in November.

Supervisory orders are spread fairly evenly throughout the year for the Third District, with between four and six percent of criminal PLAs drawing orders in the January, March, September and November terms.  Only in May did the orders become really scarce, at 1.23%.  The usual effect was reversed for the Fourth District – supervisory orders were more common late in the year than in the spring.  During the September term, 9.37% of criminal PLAs from the Fourth drew supervisory orders, and 7.94% did in November.  March was nearly as high, at 6.8%, but such orders were comparatively uncommon in January (3.51%) and March (2.55%).

Supervisory orders were most common in criminal cases during the March term for the Fifth District (this was true everywhere in the state except the Fourth District).  The Court issued orders in 7.14% of criminal PLAs decided that month. The rate was only half that in May at 3.64%, below 3% in the fall (2.47% in September, 2.8% in November), and was only 1.16% in the January term.

Table 293

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that although everyone (including us) reports reversal rates for intermediate appellate courts, it is a somewhat unfair statistic, given that for every case which winds up being reversed, the Court has declined to hear another thirty to forty cases.  Join us back here next week and we’ll combine our work on reversal rates and PLA grant rates to propose a “true” reversal rate for each District of the Appellate Court.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Nimesh Madhavan (no changes).

 

 

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Last week, we addressed the statewide data from the Illinois Supreme Court’s resolution of petitions for leave to appeal.  This week, we turn to a related question – does the time of year matter for your chances of getting a PLA granted?

In fact, the Court’s workload varies depending on the time of year, a fact which we would expect might impact the rate at which PLAs are granted.  In Table 285 below, we report the total number of petitions ruled upon by the Court, month by month, between 2007 and 2015.  The workload is at least roughly equivalent on the civil side for four of the Court’s five yearly terms.  The Court has ruled upon 810 civil petitions during January, 696 in March, and 950 in November.  We might expect the May term to be somewhat busier as litigants hurry to get their petitions filed before the pace slows somewhat in the summer, but in fact, it’s not – May is the second lightest workload for our nine years, with 803 PLAs ruled on.  But we see the impact of the summer in the September term, when the Court has decided 1,501 petitions, nearly double the Court’s workload in the other terms.

The pattern on the criminal side is quite similar.  The Court has decided 1,750 PLAs during January for the nine years, and March (1,817), May (1,645) and November (1,785) are all comparable.  But the September term is extremely busy on the criminal side of the docket – the Court has decided 2,870 PLAs in September since 2007.

Table 285

In Table 286 below, we report the percentage of PLAs granted in civil cases between 2007 and 2015 in each month (keeping in mind that the off-term months are based on very small numbers of PLAs, so we shouldn’t take the grant rates for those months all that seriously).  The year begins with 6.67% of civil PLAs being granted in January.  The March term is pretty much the same – the Court has granted 7.04% of civil PLAs decided during March since 2007.  Nor does the grant rate drop off in May as the Court prepares for the summer – 6.97% of all civil PLAs decided in May have been granted.

The second half of the year tends to be more difficult for civil PLAs.  Only 6.42% are granted during the November term.  During the September term, with workload at its highest level, not surprisingly the grant rate is at its lowest level – only 5.33% of civil PLAs decided during September have been granted since 2007.  Meanwhile, in the off-term months, no civil PLAs at all have been granted during February, June, August, October or December.  April has seen 12.5% of civil PLAs granted (only 8 have been decided in that month since 2007), and two of ten civil PLAs decided in July have been granted.

Table 286

The pattern is similar on the criminal side – the optimum time to bring a criminal PLA to the Court is in the first five months of the year.  January saw 3.31% of criminal PLAs granted, and March and May were only slightly higher – 3.47% in March, 3.77% in May. Meanwhile, in the off-term months, 5.26% of the small number of PLAs decided in February were granted, and 7.69% were granted in April.  Over the summer, 15.38% of criminal PLAs were granted in June, 9.52% in August, and none at all in July.  In November, only 3.19% of criminal PLAs were granted – lower than any month in the first half of the year.  But in September, with workload at its highest level, the criminal grant rate was at its lowest, with only 2.96% of all criminal PLAs granted.  The Court decided 10 criminal PLAs each in October and December during our nine years’ study period, granting two in October and 3 in December.

Table 287

We turn next to the “half a loaf” result for the petitioner – denied, but with a supervisory order to the Appellate Court to reconsider its decision.  In Table 288 below, we report the month-by-month data on civil PLAs denied each month with a supervisory order.  Although these numbers vary significantly more than the grant rate, the overall pattern is the same – the Court is significantly more likely to deny with a supervisory order in the first five months of the year than it is after the Court returns from the summer.  The Court has issued supervisory orders in 2.46% of civil PLAs decided in January, but has done so in 4.89% of March cases.  May has fallen in between the two – the Court has issued supervisory orders in 3.61% of civil PLAs decided in May.  Meanwhile, the Court has issued no supervisory orders at all in connection with civil PLAs in February, April, July or August.  The Court has issued such orders in 12.5% of the tiny number of civil PLAs decided in June.

The Court has issued supervisory orders in only 2.84% of civil PLAs decided during November – more than in January, but less than in March or May. In the busiest month of September, the Court has issued supervisory orders in only 2.13% of civil cases. The Court has issued supervisory orders in two of the six civil PLAs decided in October and none at all in December.

Table 288

The data on supervisory orders in criminal PLAs is varies along an unexpectedly wide band.  May and November are the most difficult months to get such a result – only 2.46% of criminal PLAs decided in November brought a supervisory order, and only 2.98% of May PLAs did.  But the other term months were significantly higher; in September, 5.54% of criminal PLAs resulted in supervisory orders.  In January, 6.17% of criminal PLAs brought such orders.  Most surprisingly of all, fully 11.56% of criminal PLAs decided during March have resulted in supervisory orders.  In off-term months, supervisory orders have been extremely rare.  Ten percent of PLAs decided in October have turned out that way, and 5.56% in July, but none in February, April, June, August or December.

Table 289

We’ve established that the term does matter to a petitioner’s chance of getting a PLA granted at the Illinois Supreme Court.  Tomorrow, we turn to a slightly different question: does that effect differ among the districts of the Appellate Court?

Image courtesy of Flickr by David Wilson (no changes).

 

Courthouse Detail

Yesterday, we reviewed the statewide data on the civil and criminal petitions for leave to appeal heard and resolved by the Illinois Supreme Court, dividing them into PLAs granted, denied with a supervisory order, and denied outright.  Today, we turn to the District-by-District data.

In the title of this post, we ask whether the District matters as far as one’s odds of getting a grant.  The short answer is yes, although the Court seems to shift its focus from one District to another over the years.  We report the percentage of civil PLAs granted by District in Table 283 below.  The first thing we notice about this chart is that the Fifth District – historically the highest reversal rate in civil cases – is by no means the highest grant rate in civil PLAs.  In fact, in a number of years, it’s been among the lowest grant rates.

The grant rate for the First District is highest in 2007 at 7.12%.  The First District’s rate falls to between 5 and 6% in 2008 and 2009 before rising to 6.27% in 2010.  In 2014, the grant rate in the First rises back to 7.11% before falling back to 3.86% in 2015.

The grant rate in the Second and Third Districts in 2007 and 2008 was over 10% – higher than the First District has reached at any point during our period.  The Second District was at its lowest in 2015 at 2.60% granted.  The Third District fell all the way to 1.82% in 2011 before rising to 10.42% the following year.  In 2015, the Third District was the place to be if you were filing a civil PLA – the grant rate was 8.16%, the highest in the state.

The Fourth District, which has generally had a fairly low reversal rate, has at times had a fairly high grant rate, topping 10% grants in 2007 (13.24%), 2012 (12%) and 2014 (10.26%).  On the other hand, the grant rate in the Fourth District has been below 6% in five of the remaining six years, excepting only 2013, falling all the way to 1.96% in 2015.

In three of the nine years, the Fifth District has had the lowest grant rate in civil cases in the state.  In 2007, when grants were over 10% in the Second, Third and Fourth Districts, only 2.90% of PLAs in civil cases coming from the Fifth District were granted.  The grant rate rose to 7.81% in 2010, but remained at 5% or less between 2011 and 2013.  The civil grant rate in the Fifth District had a one-year spike in 2014, with 14.29% of civil PLAs granted, before falling all the way to 3.08% in 2015.

Table 283

We report the District-by-District data for criminal, quasi-criminal and juvenile matters in Table 284 below.  Once again, the First District is definitely not the place to be if one is pursuing a PLA.  Slightly more than 3% of criminal PLAs were granted in the First District in 2008 and 2009, but otherwise, the grant rate has remained between two and three percent every year – falling to a low of only 2.04% granted in 2015. The experience at the Second District can be divided into two periods – 2007-2009, when the grant rate was between five and 8.5 per cent each year – and the years since, when the grant rate has ranged from a low of 2.08% to a high of only 3.68%.

The grant rate in the Third District has been the highest in the state for four of our nine years.  The rate began at 7.19% in 2007 and was only slightly lower at 7.14% two years later.  The grant rate lost a point or two the next two years – 5.22% in 2010 and 6.2% the following year – before dropping to a mere 3.65% in 2012.  In the years since, the grant rate in the Third District has climbed each year, to 4% in 2013, 6.32% in 2014 and 8.6% last year.

The grant rate in the Fourth District has declined in recent years.  Grant rates in 2007 and 2008 were about the statewide average, at 4.8% and 5.31%, before falling all the way to 1.79% in 2009.  The grant rate rose back again to the same level in 2010 and 2011 (4.73% and 4.92%, respectively), before dropping and staying down – 2.47% in 2012, 3.17% in 2013, 3.48% in 2014 and 3.13% in 2015.

The Fifth District, on the other hand, has contributed zero criminal-side grants in four of our nine years – 2007-2008 and 2010-2011. Even in the other years, the Fifth hasn’t been an easy place to take up a criminal case from.  Grant rates were below five percent in three years (2.86% in 2009; 4.84% in 2012, and 3.28% in 2014).  Only in 2013, when 7.14% of all Fifth District criminal PLAs were granted, and last year, when 8.51% were granted, has the Fifth District been up among the statewide leaders as far as grant rates.

Table 284

Join us back here next Tuesday when we’ll turn to the District-by-District data on cases which were denied with a supervisory order.  From there, we’ll analyze the data month by month.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Richie Diesterheft (no changes).

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Last week, we wrapped up our review of the District-by-District reversal rates in civil and criminal cases at the Illinois Supreme Court.  Today, we begin a close look at the Court’s experience with Petitions for Leave to Appeal, or “PLAs.”

First, a few ground rules.  The data is derived from the materials posted under “Leave to Appeal Dispositions” on the Court’s website, which cover the period of 2007 to the present.  We don’t count cases in which the Court ultimately dismissed the case on the grounds that a party had sought and received an extension to file a PLA but ultimately opted not to do so.  We count as one case instances where multiple parties to a single litigation file petitions and the Court grants them all and consolidates.  We divide the petitions into three categories – denied, granted, and denied with a supervisory order.  Supervisory orders as a general rule are issued in cases where the Court wants the Appellate Court to reconsider a case in light of a very recent Supreme Court decision, and we include them since they often amount to a “half a loaf” result for the petitioner, preferable to an outright denial.  Finally, we’re disregarding for these purposes direct appeals from the Circuit Courts and certified questions from the Seventh Circuit so that we can focus on the Court’s discretionary docket arising from the Appellate Court.

We report the total number of PLAs ruled upon by the Court, year by year, in Table 280 below.  For the entire nine years, the Court has ruled on 4,811 civil PLAs and 9,971 criminal PLAs.  On the civil side, 6.32% were granted, while 2.97% were denied with a supervisory order, leaving 90.71% denied outright.  The grant rate on the criminal side was lower – only 4.79% – but 5.74% of criminal PLAs were denied with a supervisory order, meaning 89.47% of all criminal PLAs since 2007 have been denied.

Civil petitions were relatively stable from 2007 until 2011, beginning at 535 in 2007, jumping to 568 the next year and rising back to 569 by 2011.  Civil PLAs have declined about 11% in the years since – to 536 in 2012, 514 in 2013, 505 in 2014, and 503 in 2015.

Criminal PLAs have fallen even more precipitously.  The Court ruled on 1,235 criminal PLAs in 2011, and considered between 1,100 and 1,200 each of the next three years.  The Court reached its highest level in 2011 (just as was true on the civil side) with 1,348 criminal PLAs ruled on.  Since then, PLAs are down 37% – to 1,159 in 2012, 956 in 2013, 942 in 2014, and 849 in 2015.

Table 280

Although the Court’s flow of civil PLAs has been relatively stable over the past nine years, the rate at which the petitions are granted has varied from year to year.  Grant rates were highest in 2007 – 8.41%.  The civil grant rate was between six and seven percent in 2008, 2009 and 2010.  The next year – when civil PLAs were at their highest level of the period – the civil grant rate fell to 5.27%.  By 2014, the grant rate rose to 7.72% before falling last year to its lowest level of the past nine years – only 3.28% of civil PLAs were granted.

Despite the significant fall-off in the level of criminal PLAs being filed, the grant rate has been slightly more stable over time than on the civil side.  The Court granted just short of 4% of all criminal PLAs in 2007 and 2008 (3.88% and 3.99%, respectively), before grants rose to their highest level of the period at 4.12% in 2009.  It got progressively more difficult to get a criminal PLA granted for the three years that followed, with the Court granting only 3.35% in 2010, 2.67% in 2011 and 2.76% in 2012.  The numbers are up only slightly since then, with the Court granting 3.03% of criminal PLAs in 2013, 3.08% in 2014 and 3.3% last year.

Table 281

We report the statewide rate of denials with supervisory orders in Table 282 below.  Such orders are less common than outright grants on the civil side in each of the past nine years.  In 2007, the Court issued supervisory orders in 4.3% of civil PLAs.  The rate fell to 3.17% the following year before increasing back to 4.06% in 2009.  Since then, supervisory orders have been rarer on the civil side, with the Court issuing the orders in around 3% of cases between 2010 and 2012 (2.8%,3.16% and 3.17%), before falling to only 1.95% in 2013 and 1.39% in 2014.  Supervisory orders were up slightly on the civil side in 2015, being issued in 2.78% of civil PLAs.

Supervisory orders were more common on the criminal side each year between 2007 and 2011.  2007 was an unusual year, with orders being issued in 12.07% of criminal PLAs.  The orders were issued 4.26% of the time in 2008 and 5.13% the next year before jumping back to 9.44% in 2010.  Curiously, between 2012 and 2015, supervisory orders have been more common on the civil side in three of four years.  2.76% of criminal PLAs received supervisory orders in 2012, 1.78% in 2013, 4.03% in 2014 and 2.24% last year.

Table 282

Join us back here tomorrow as we turn our attention to the District-by-District data.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Jack Pearce (no changes).

 

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Today, we conclude the first stage in our review of how the Districts and Divisions of the Appellate Court have fared at the Illinois Supreme Court with a look at the Appellate Court’s reversal rate in criminal cases between 2011 and 2015.

In Table 277 below, we report the overall statewide reversal rate for criminal cases.  Reversals continued their trend from the previous five years in 2011 and 2012, with 51.06% of all criminal cases ending in reversal in 2011 and 51.52% in 2012.  In the years since, the reversal rate has become a bit more unstable, jumping to 60.53% in 2013, falling back to only 41.18% in 2014 and then rising back to 69.7% last year.

Table 277

Because a significant fraction of the Court’s criminal docket tends to come from the First District, it’s not surprising that reversal rates in the Divisions of the First District don’t deviate much from the statewide averages.  For the period, only Division One (well below the statewide reversal rates between 2006 and 2010) spent most of the period with a reversal rate above the statewide figure – only 30% in 2011 and 42.86% in 2012, but 80% in 2013 and 100% in each of the two most recent years.  Division Two’s reversal rate was comparatively low in 2011 and 2012 (33.3% and 25, respectively), before matching the statewide average the next two years (50% in 2013 and 60% in 2014), and jumping ahead last year at 66.67%.  Division Three was slightly above the statewide rate in 2011 and a bit below the following year before staying quite close to it in the three most recent years.  The reversal rate in Division Four spiked in 2011 and 2013 (70% and 62.5%, respectively), but was right around the statewide average every other year in the period (57.14% in 2012 and 2014, 50% in 2015).  Only Divisions Five and Six have been under the statewide average for the most of the period; Division Five had a reversal rate of 50% in 2012 and 2014, a rate of 40% in 2013 and a reversal rate of only 20% in 2015.  Division Six had a reversal rate of one-third in 2011 and zero in 2012, but has risen somewhat in the years since – to 40% in 2013, half in 2014 and 62.5% last year.

Table 278

We report the reversal rates for the remaining Districts of the Appellate Court in Table 279 below.  Many of the Districts out in the state had reversal rates above the statewide average for much of the time between 2011 and 2015. The Third District’s reversal rate was between 60% and two-thirds in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015.  The reversal rate in the Fifth District was only half in 2011 and 2012, before rising to 100% in 2013, 83.33% in 2014 and three-quarters last year.  Most recently, the Court has reversed three-quarters of direct appeals (2013 and 2015) and two-thirds in 2014.

The reversal rate for the Fourth District, on the other hand, tended to be right at the statewide average, coming in between 42% and 46% in 2011, 2012 and 2015, and only slightly higher in 2013.  Similarly, the reversal rate in criminal cases from the First District which we couldn’t attribute to a Division was between forty and fifty percent from 2011 through 2014.  Only District Two remained below the overall reversal rate in recent years – 47.83% in 2011 and half in 2012, but only 28.57$ in 2013, 15.38% in 2014 and 30.77% in 2015.

Table 279

Join us back here next Tuesday as we begin to address the Court’s handling of petitions for leave to appeal in civil and criminal cases.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Yiannis Theologos Michellis (no changes).

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Last week, we addressed the reversal rates for civil and criminal cases at the Illinois Supreme Court between 2006 and 2010.  Today, we turn to the final five years of our study period, 2011-2015.

Statewide reversal rates in civil cases were in the same range between 2011 and 2015 that they were during the previous five years.  In 2011, the statewide reversal rate was 51.35%.  The reversal rate jumped to 76.92% the following year before declining to 55.88% in 2013.  In 2014, 70.37% of all civil cases were reversed, but the following year, the reversal rate fell to 54.54%.

Table 274

We turn next to the three-year floating reversal rates for the Divisions of Chicago’s First District.  As shown in Table 275 below, reversal rates in Divisions 1, 2, 3 and 6 remained comparatively high throughout the relevant period.  The three-year floating reversal rate was over 90% for Division 1 in 2013 and 2014 and for Division 2 in 2012.  Three-year floating reversal rates were over 75% in Division 2 for 2011, 2012 and 2014; for Division 3 in 2014, for Division 5 in 2011 and for Division 6 in 2012 and 2015.  On the other hand, reversal rates in Division 4 were well below state averages at the outset of the period (37.5% in 2011, 30% in 2012), and reversal rates in Division 5 were well below average at the end (40% in 2013, 16.67% in 2014, 28.57% in 2015).

Table 275

We report the reversal rate data for the remaining districts of the Appellate Court in Table 276 below.  As we’ve reported for previous periods, the Fourth District was somewhat below the statewide average throughout these five years – 45.45% in 2011; 30% in 2012; 47.06% in 2013; 50% in 2014; 47.37% in 2015.  The Second District, which had a somewhat high reversal rate in earlier periods, was right around the statewide average for the most part during these most recent five years – 50% in 2011; 57.89% in 2012; 59.09% in 2013; 81.25% in 2014; 58.82% in 2015.

The reversal rate at the Third District has been somewhat above the statewide average in recent years.  In 2011, the three-year floating rate for the Third District was 63.64%.  The following year, the rate was 75%.  The reversal rate dropped the following two years – 60% in 2013 and 57.14% the following year – before jumping to 83.33% in 2015.  The Fifth District’s reversal rate was the highest in the State throughout this five-year period – 85.71% in 2011, 78.57% in 2012, 81.82% in 2013 and 2014, and 80% in 2015.

The Court continued to take a skeptical view of direct appeals – for the most part, cases in which the Circuit Court had struck down a state statute.  In 2011, 2014 and 2015, the three-year floating reversal rate was 66.67%.  In 2012, it was 100%.

Table 276

Join us back here tomorrow as we address the reversal rate in criminal cases between 2011 and 2015.  After that, we’ll turn to the Court’s handling of PLA’s from the Districts, and begin to derive a “true” reversal rate for each District.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Matt Turner (no changes).