349497988_fb751a5e3a_zToday we return to our Justice-by-Justice review of the voting patterns of the Justices of the Illinois Supreme Court. We’ve been analyzing whether the Justices’ question patterns allow us to tentatively infer the Justices’ likely votes, and which Justices might be writing opinions.

Table 96 contains the data for cases in which Justice Karmeier votes with the majority. On the left side of the Table we see Justice Karmeier’s question patterns in reversals. Justice Karmeier tends to ask significantly more questions when he’s writing the majority opinion in a reversal, both of appellants and appellees. Writing a special concurrence has little impact on Justice Karmeier’s question patterns.

The pattern is similar with affirmances. Justice Karmeier asks four times as many questions of both appellants and appellees when he’s writing the majority opinion. In contrast to the situation with reversals, Justice Karmeier averages somewhat more questions even when he’s writing a concurrence than when he’s not writing an opinion.

Table 96

In Table 97 below, we address cases in which Justice Karmeier was in the minority. Although the sample size was quite small, when Justice Karmeier was in the minority of a reversal, he averaged more questions of both appellants and appellees when not writing an opinion than when he wrote a dissent. On the other hand, when Justice Karmeier was in the minority of an affirmance, he averaged significantly more questions of both appellants and appellees when writing a dissent than when he was not writing an opinion.

Table 97

Tomorrow, we’ll address whether Justice Karmeier’s voting and writing affects the likelihood of his asking either side the first question.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Stefan Baudy (no changes).

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Today we conclude our preview of the civil oral arguments in the Illinois Supreme Court’s November term with a look at the numbers for Stone Street Partners, LLC v. City of Chicago Department of Administrative Hearings.  Our detailed summary of the facts and lower court opinions in Stone Street is here.

Stone Street began in 1999 when a City building inspector found various building code violations in one of plaintiff’s buildings.  But the City didn’t mail the notice to the plaintiff’s business address or registered agent – instead, it sent the notice to the property itself.  Someone appeared at the hearing on the plaintiff’s behalf, filed an appearance and presented exhibits.  Nevertheless, the plaintiff was found liable and fined.  The administrative judgment was filed with the Circuit Court and in 2009, the City recorded the judgment with the Recorder of Deeds.  The plaintiff maintained that it knew nothing about any of this until it got a copy of the judgment in a FOIA request in 2011.  The plaintiff filed a motion to vacate and set aside the administrative order based on lack of notice, claiming that the person who represented the plaintiff at the hearing had no authority to do so.  The administrative hearing officer denied the motion to set aside, so the plaintiff filed a complaint for administrative review.  The trial court granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss.  The Appellate Court affirmed dismissal on the first cause of action to set aside the judgment, but reversed dismissal of the plaintiff’s claims for quiet title and declaratory judgment.

Between 2000 and 2014, the Supreme Court has heard fifty cases in which the primary issue was government or administrative law.  It has reversed in 37% of cases where the plaintiff challenging the government won at the Appellate Court, but has reversed 50% of government wins from the Appellate Court.

Table 93

The individual Justices’ voting records are consistent with this data.  Justices Burke, Thomas, Karmeier and Theis have all voted for the plaintiffs in more than sixty percent of Government and Administrative law cases.  Only Justices Kilbride, Freeman and Chief Justice Garman have supported the plaintiff less than sixty percent of the time; none of the Justices have voted for the plaintiffs less than half the time.

Table 94

Turning to an analysis of decisions below, only Justices Kilbride, Freeman, Thomas and Theis have voted to reverse thirty percent or more of plaintiffs’ wins below in cases at the Illinois Supreme Court.  Justices Burke and Karmeier are the least likely to vote to reverse such decisions.  Justices Burke, Thomas, Karmeier and Theis are the Justices who most frequently vote to reverse wins for the government before the Appellate Court.  Since Stone Street was a mixed result below, with the plaintiffs winning some claims and the City winning others, this suggests that Justices Kilbride, Thomas and Freeman are the most likely Justices to be sympathetic to the City’s viewpoint, while Justices Burke, Karmeier and Theis are the most likely to be sympathetic to the plaintiffs.

Table 95

Tomorrow, we’ll resume our data analytic review of the Court’s oral arguments between 2008 and 2014 with day one of our analysis of Justice Lloyd Karmeier’s questioning patterns.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Ray Dumas (no changes).

 

3298874517_11429d4d21_zYesterday, we began our preview of the Illinois Supreme Court’s November term with Jones v. Municipal Employees Annuity and Benefit Fund, which involves a decision from the Circuit Court of Cook County striking down SB 1922, a bill aimed at saving the Chicago public employee pension funds. Today, we conclude our preview of Jones with a look at the Justices’ individual voting records.

In Table 91 below, we show the percentage of the time each Justice has voted for the employer in the public pension cases that Justice has participated in. We see that the Court does not divide along party lines for this issue. The Justices most frequently voting for the employer are the Chief Justice, Justice Burke and Justices Freeman (Justices Burke and Freeman have recused in Jones) and Thomas. If any (or all) of these Justices question the City and the State significantly more heavily than the plaintiffs in Jones, then the employers are likely headed for a defeat. On the other hand, if Justices Kilbride, Karmeier or Theis appear skeptical of the plaintiffs’ position, then the Chicago pension reform act may survive.

Table 91

Let’s take a somewhat different look at the data and focus on the Appellate Court decision. In Table 92 below, we show the data for how often each Justice has voted to reverse decisions won by the employer and employee below. Jones arrives at the Court as a lower-court win for the employees. Among the Justices participating in Jones, Justices Karmeier and Thomas and Chief Justice Garman are the most likely to vote to reverse employee wins from the lower court. On the other hand, Justices Theis, Kilbride and Karmeier are most likely to vote to reverse employer wins below.

Table 92

Join us next week for a data-centric preview of Stone Street Partners, LLC v. City of Chicago Department of Administrative Hearings, the other civil case on the Court’s November argument docket.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Tony Webster (no changes).

2550969013_5d0f9c8a5b_zToday we begin a short hiatus from our data analytics look at oral arguments before the Illinois Supreme Court for a brief preview of Court’s November term. We begin with Jones v. Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, a sequel of sorts to In re Pension Reform Litigation from earlier this year. This time, the Court is reviewing a decision from the Circuit Court of Cook County striking down SB 1922, a bill aimed at saving the Chicago pension system.

In December 2014, just before SB 1922 was due to go into effect, the plaintiffs – fourteen individual participants in the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago and four labor unions – filed a declaratory judgment action alleging that the Act violated the pension protection clause of the Illinois Constitution, which reads: “Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.” In late January 2015, the Court commenced a hearing on the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, taking evidence for several days. At that point, the City was defending the Act largely as a valid exercise of its reserved sovereign powers – the same defense the State was pursuing before the Supreme Court in In re Pension Reform Litigation. Before the hearing concluded, the Court stayed the litigation to await the Supreme Court’s decision.

Like the State funds, the pension funds at issue in Jones are substantially underfunded. According to an actuary testifying for the City, one fund will run out of money in 2026, and the other by 2029. Like the state funds, the funds are in the condition they’re in because of two factors – underperforming their expectations on investment returns and the failure of employee and employer contributions to keep pace with the funds’ liabilities.

In 2011, representatives of the Mayor met with representatives of an umbrella organization including 31 of the affected labor unions. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the meetings produced a proposal. According to a witness for the City, twenty-eight of the thirty-one unions voted to support the new funding proposal. On the other hand, witnesses for the plaintiffs testified that they didn’t understand the meetings with the City as being aimed at a negotiated resolution, they didn’t have authority to bargain away their members’ pension rights anyway, and they didn’t recall any votes.

As eventually enacted, the pension reform act made a series of changes: it reduces annual increases, removes a compounding component, eliminates annual increases entirely in certain years and postpones the time when an annuitant will receive the initial increase. The Act changes employee contribution levels to the funds. It also makes employer contributions (for the first time) an enforceable obligation of the City, rather than just an obligation of the funds.

The plaintiffs argue that in the wake of In re Pension Reform Litigation, the result of Jones is a foregone conclusion – the pension reform act diminishes serving employees’ benefits, and is therefore unconstitutional. The City offered two responses.

First, the City argued that the act provides a “net benefit” to the members of the funds. By putting the funds on a path to solvency and making the funds an obligation of the City, the members receive the “benefit” of actually receiving their benefits well into the future, as opposed to a theoretical right to greater benefits which would have bankrupted the funds.

Second, the City pointed to language in In re Pension Reform Litigation where the Supreme Court stated that benefits could be changed for consideration when additional benefits are added. That’s exactly what happened here, the City argued – benefits were adjusted in exchange for the consideration of guaranteed funding mechanisms.

The Circuit Court concluded that there was no real difference between the reductions in employee benefits made by the Act and the benefit cuts enacted by the pension reform act reviewed in In re Pension Reform Litigation. As such, the Act was fundamentally at odds with the pension protection clause.

The Court rejected the City’s “net benefit” theory. The problem with the theory, the Court held, was that it rested on the proposition that employees had no enforceable right to receive their pension benefits. Further, the “benefits” expressly protected by the pension protection clause extended solely to payments to annuitants, not to funding choices made by the political branches. Accordingly, a change in the funding mechanism was not a “benefit” which could outweigh a reduction in payments. This was particularly true, the court held, given that the new funding mechanisms were entirely within the control of the legislature and could be altered at any time. Finally, the argument ignored the Supreme Court’s explanation in In re Pension Reform Litigation that benefits reductions were simply beyond the legislative authority of government.

The City’s “bargained-for exchange” argument fared no better. There was no evidence that the unions had negotiated the Act with the city as collective bargaining representatives of their members, nor was there any evidence that membership had voted on the agreement. Finally, there was no basis for concluding that the unions had any authority to represent retired members while acting as the representative of current employees.

Even more fundamentally, the court wrote, it was far from clear that labor unions could ever bargain away the pension rights of their members. Numerous cases support the proposition that the rights involved in the pension protection clause are personal to the employee or annuitant.

The court concluded by noting the language providing that the funding and benefits provisions of the Act were non-severable. The court held that the legislature would not have adopted the Act without the unconstitutional provisions, so the entire Act was void.

Jones comes to the Supreme Court as a direct appeal pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 302. Since 2000, the Court has heard 47 direct appeals in civil cases – 36.2% wins for defendants at the trial level, 63.8% wins for plaintiffs (as Jones is). The Court has been quite skeptical of Circuit Court rulings on direct appeals, reversing 76.7% of plaintiff wins and 70.6% of defendant wins.

The Court has handed down fifty-three decisions in civil cases since 2000 dealing primarily with issues of constitutional law – 41.5% defendant wins below, 58.5% plaintiff wins. Notwithstanding the result in In re Pension Reform Litigation, the Court has been reluctant to strike down legislation. The Court has reversed only 31.8% of the defendant wins in the field of constitutional law, while reversing 64.5% of the plaintiff wins.

Join us back here tomorrow for the conclusion of our preview of Jones, when we’ll review the individual Justices voting records on cases involving public employee pensions.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Bert Kaufmann (no changes).

20699620022_eb701a8717_zYesterday, we continued our Justice-by-Justice review of the question patterns of the Justices of the Illinois Supreme Court, asking what we can infer about Justice Robert R. Thomas’ likely vote, and the chances that he is writing an opinion, based upon his level of questioning to each side. Today, we turn to a related question: how do Justice Thomas’ votes and writing impact the likelihood that he’ll ask the first question of either side?

Table 89 below reports the data when Justice Thomas votes with the majority. We see that Justice Thomas asks the first question of each side more than half the time when the Court reverses with Justice Thomas in the majority. When the Court affirms, Justice Thomas asks the first question of appellants in slightly over 82% of all cases, but of appellees much less frequently – in a bit more than 35% of cases. Writing makes a significant difference when the Court reverses – Justice Thomas is generally the first questioner of both sides when the Court reverses and he’s writing the majority opinion. Affirmances are a little less clear – Justice Thomas is a bit more likely to ask the first question of appellants when the Court affirms, but significantly less likely to ask the first question of appellees. (The number for questions to appellants when Justice Thomas is writing a special concurrence isn’t a misprint – when multiple attorneys appear on one side or the other, we score multiple “firsts” in the argument charts, so it’s possible for a Justice to average more than a 100% likelihood of asking the first question.)

Table 89

In Table 90 below, we turn to the cases in which Justice Thomas has voted in the minority. The data reflects that Justice Thomas is nearly always the first questioner in such cases. Justice Thomas is slightly more likely to ask the first question of appellants when the Court reverses but he’s voting to affirm, although he’s never asked the first question of appellees in such cases. When the Court affirms with Justice Thomas in the minority, he is less likely to ask the first question when he’s writing a dissent.

Table 90

Next week, we’ll do a data analytic preview of two key cases from the Court’s November term.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Beth Cortez-Neavel (no changes).

 

2847733790_15646d78d1_zIn recent weeks, we’ve been taking a close look, Justice by Justice, at the question patterns of the members of the Illinois Supreme Court. We’ve been analyzing whether the Justices’ question patterns allows us to tentatively infer the Justices’ likely votes, and which Justices might be writing opinions.

Table 87 contains the data for cases in which Justice Robert R. Thomas votes with the majority. On the left side of the Table we see Justice Thomas’ question patterns in reversals. Justice Thomas tends to ask significantly more questions when he’s writing the opinion in a reversal, both of appellants and appellees. Writing a special concurrence, on the other hand, has little impact on Justice Thomas’ questioning. The pattern is the same with affirmances, although the impact is much less. Justice Thomas tends to ask slightly more questions of both sides when he’s writing the majority opinion in an affirmance than when he’s not writing. Note that in both cases, Justice Thomas tends to ask more questions of the party which ultimately loses the case.

Table 87

In Table 88 below, we show the question data when Justice Thomas is in the minority – reversals on the left, affirmances on the right. When Justice Thomas is in the minority of a reversal, he averages far more questions of the appellant – the party he votes against, rather than the party losing the case. The effect is the same when Justice Thomas is in the minority of an affirmance – he averages more questions of the appellee rather than the losing appellant.

The effect of writing when Justice Thomas is in the minority is somewhat stronger than the effect when he’s in the majority. Justice Thomas averages nearly triple the number of questions of appellants when he’s dissenting from a reversal than when he joins another Justice’s dissent. When he’s in the minority of an affirmance, Justice Thomas averages nearly triple the number of questions of both sides, compared to when he’s not writing.

Table 88

Tomorrow, we’ll address whether Justice Thomas’ voting and writing affects the likelihood of his asking either side the first question.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Cliff (no changes).

 

 

391442105_fa7b50e0db_zToday we continue our Justice-by-Justice analysis of the question patterns during oral argument on the Illinois Supreme Court, looking further at the data on Justice Charles E. Freeman. Yesterday, we discovered that in contrast to Justices Burke and Kilbride, Justice Freeman doesn’t tend to question counsel more heavily in cases where he winds up writing an opinion.

Today, we address whether Justice Freeman’s votes and writing has an impact on the likelihood that he’ll ask the first question of either side.

In Table 85 below, we see the data when Justice Freeman is voting with the majority. The first noteworthy point here is that although Justice Freeman ranks fifth among the seven Justices in asking questions, it is not at all uncommon for Justice Freeman to ask the first question. When the Court reverses with Justice Freeman in the majority, we see the same pattern as we saw yesterday with total questions – Justice Freeman is less likely to ask the first question when he’s writing the majority than when he’s not writing at all. He’s more often the first questioner of the appellant – the party who ultimately loses – than of the appellee. Turning to affirmances, Justice Freeman is somewhat less likely to be the first question. Once again, writing the majority opinion has no clear impact on the chances that Justice Freeman will be the first questioner.

Table 85

In Table 86, we see cases in which Justice Freeman is in the minority – reversals on the left, affirmances on the right. Note that being in the minority has a significant impact on the likelihood that Justice Freeman will ask the first question – for both sides, the percentages roughly double over cases where he’s in the majority. Justice Freeman is far more likely to ask the first question of the side he will ultimately vote against than of the side which wins the case; when the Court reverses with Justice Freeman in the minority, he leads off with the appellant a bit over half the time, and when the Court affirms, he begins with the appellee in exactly half the cases. And in these cases, we see for the first time that writing does have an impact; Justice Freeman is much more likely to ask the first question when he’s in the minority and writes a dissent than when he merely joins the dissent of another Justice.

Table 86

Next week, we’ll turn to the data on questions by Justice Robert R. Thomas.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Ken Lund (no changes).

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Last week, we continued our detailed look at the questioning patterns of the Justices of the Illinois Supreme Court with Justice Thomas L. Kilbride.  Today, we turn to the question patterns of Justice Charles E. Freeman.

Justice Freeman’s question patterns differ from Justices Burke and Kilbride in several ways.  In cases where Justice Freeman votes with the majority, he averages slightly more questions to the appellant, regardless of whether the Court reverses or affirms.  Justice Freeman actually averages slightly fewer questions when he’s voting with the majority in a reversal and writing the majority opinion than when he’s not, and that pattern holds with both appellants and appellees.  He averages slightly more questions when he’s writing a concurrence, but that data set is quite small, so the conclusion should be taken with caution.

When Justice Freeman is voting with the majority in an affirmance, the pattern is much the same.  Justice Freeman averages more questions to the appellant – the losing party – when he’s writing the majority opinion in an affirmance, but slightly fewer to the appellee.  Writing a concurrence has no consistent impact on Justice Freeman’s question patterns in affirmances.

Justice Freeman tends to ask significantly more questions of the appellant when the Court reverses with him in the minority than in reversals where he’s in the majority, but fewer questions in such cases of the appellee.  Although Justice Freeman averages more questions to the appellee when writing a dissent than when he’s not writing, dissents have no impact on his questioning to the appellant.

The pattern is quite similar when Justice Freeman is in the minority of an affirmance.  He tends to ask both sides at least slightly more questions in such cases than when he’s with the majority in an affirmance.  Although Justice Freeman asks slightly more questions of appellees when he’s dissenting, dissents have no real impact on the intensity of his questions to appellants.

Table 83

Justice Freeman tends to ask significantly more questions of the appellant when the Court reverses with him in the minority than in reversals where he’s in the majority, but fewer questions in such cases of the appellee.  Although Justice Freeman averages more questions to the appellee when writing a dissent than when he’s not writing, dissents have no impact on his questioning to the appellant.

The pattern is quite similar when Justice Freeman is in the minority of an affirmance.  He tends to ask both sides at least slightly more questions in such cases than when he’s with the majority in an affirmance.  Although Justice Freeman asks slightly more questions of appellees when he’s dissenting, dissents have no real impact on the intensity of his questions to appellants.

Table 84

Unlike Justices Burke and Kilbride, Justice Freeman’s question patterns don’t appear to vary significantly when he’s writing an opinion.  Tomorrow, we’ll look at whether Justice Freeman’s voting and writing has an impact on the likelihood of his asking either side the first question.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Jay Carriker (no changes).

 

 

 

 

3263691720_b8f98eb93b_oYesterday, we continued our Justice-by-Justice review of question patterns in oral arguments at the Illinois Supreme Court, beginning our two-day look at Justice Thomas L. Kilbride. Our goal is to explore what we can infer about how each Justice might vote, and whether he or she is writing an opinion, from the Justice’s questioning. Today, we look at whether Justice Kilbride’s vote and opinion writing impacts the likelihood that he will ask the first question of either side.

Justice Kilbride is more likely to ask the first question when he’s in the majority of a reversal than when he’s in the majority of an affirmance. He also is much more likely to ask the first question of an appellant, whether he joins the majority in a reversal or an affirmance. Justice Kilbride is significantly more likely to ask the first question of either side when he’s writing the majority decision in a reversal; there is a 9.62% chance that Justice Kilbride will ask the first question of an appellant when he’s not writing, but a 21.42% chance that he asks the first question when he’s writing the majority opinion. Justice Kilbride is similarly significantly more likely to ask the first question of appellees in reversals when he’s writing the majority opinion than when he’s not writing. On the other hand, Justice Kilbride has asked no first questions of either side when the Court affirms with Justice Kilbride writing the majority opinion.

Table 81

Turning to cases in which Justice Kilbride voted in the minority, we find that Justice Kilbride asked the first question when dissenting from a reversal in nearly the same percentage of cases – 5.88% of the time for appellants, 5.55% of the time for appellees. However, once again, writing an opinion had an effect. Justice Kilbride asked the first question of appellants 10% of the time when he wrote a dissent, and of appellees 8.33% of the time in such cases.

Justice Kilbride asked the first question of appellants when the Court affirmed with Justice Kilbride in the minority 7.69% of the time. Once again, he was significantly more likely to ask the first question when he was writing a dissent than when he was not writing. Justice Kilbride didn’t ask the first question of appellees in any case where the Court affirmed with Justice Kilbride in dissent.

Table 82A

Next week we’ll turn to analyzing the question patterns of Justice Charles Freeman.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Robert Nunnally (no changes).

17078225817_744ab2b298_zLast week, we began our detailed look at the individual Justices’ question patterns during oral argument. You’ll recall we began by dividing 233 oral arguments in civil cases into the four possible voting scenarios – the Justice voting with the majority to reverse or affirm, and the Justice voting in the minority in either case. In the tables below, the first letter designates the result, and the second refers to the Justice’s vote. We then divided the cases by whether or not the Justice wrote an opinion: not writing, writing the majority or special concurrences when the Justice is in the majority, and not writing or dissent when he or she is in the minority.

The Table below reflects Justice Thomas Kilbride’s question patterns when voting with the majority. As we noted a month ago, Justice Kilbride is, in most years, the lightest questioner on the Court in civil cases, and the data reflects that. When the Court affirms, Justice Kilbride asks slightly more questions of the appellant – the losing party – than of the appellee. Curiously, when the Court reverses, Justice Kilbride has averaged exactly the same number of questions of the two sides. In reversals, it is clear that writing has some impact on the Justice’s patterns; he averages significantly more questions when he’s writing the majority opinion than when he’s not writing at all (Justice Kilbride has asked no questions when he’s writing a special concurrence in reversals). On the other hand, Justice Kilbride averages fewer questions when he’s writing the majority opinion and the Court affirms, as compared to cases where he’s not writing one of the opinions.

Table 79

We turn next to the cases in which Justice Kilbride is in the minority. When the Court reverses but Justice Kilbride votes to affirm, he averages somewhat more questions to the appellant – the party Justice Kilbride ultimately votes against. He averages significantly more questions in those cases when he’s writing a dissent than in cases where he isn’t.

On the other hand, where the Court affirms with Justice Kilbride in the minority, his average question level is quite close. In such cases, Justice Kilbride does average significantly more questions to appellants when he’s writing a dissent than when he’s not. However, dissents have no impact on questioning to the appellee.

Table 80

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at what we can infer about Justice Kilbride’s likely vote and whether he might be writing an opinion from whether he asks the first question of either side.

Image courtesy of Flickr by StockMonkeys.com (no changes).