Yesterday, we began our analysis of the average time under submission at the Illinois Supreme Court for civil cases. Today, we probe further the question of what can be predicted from time under submission by considering the year-by-year data.
In Table 237 below, we report the lag times for divided and unanimous civil decisions at
Today we turn to another phase of our analysis of the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision making, asking what we can predict from the time a case has been under submission between oral argument and decision.
In Table 235, we report the overall data for civil cases. The lag time at the Court has been consistently
Last week, we investigated several questions about the data on oral argument question patterns at the Illinois Supreme Court: (1) is the party who gets more questions statistically more likely to lose; (2) do the odds against winning get longer as the difference in the number of questions asked one side and the other increases;
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