Today, we’re beginning a new multi-part series of posts, looking at the reversal rates for each District and Division of the Appellate Court by the area of law involved in the case. First up: the First District Appellate Court in the 1990s. There was only one environmental law and one election law case, and each was reversed. Three areas had a 75% reversal rate: domestic relations, property law and commercial law. The reversal rate for tort law was 65.7%. In civil procedure, it was 65.6%, and for government and administrative law cases, just a bit lower still – 65%. The reversal rate for constitutional law was 54.6%. Half of the wills and estates cases were reversed. The reversal rates for both contract and arbitration cases were 40%. Insurance was slightly lower at 38.5%. One-third of workers compensation cases were reversed. The lowest subject matter reversal rates for First District cases were in tax law – 25% – and employment law – 20%.
Reviewing the divisions of the First District for outliers, tort decisions were reasonably uniform. The reversal rate from Division One was 87.5%, down to a low of 50% for Division Six. Government and administrative law decisions were similar – 50% from Divisions One, Two and Four, 80% from Division Three. The lowest overall reversal rate – employment law – also saw the widest variance: 100% for Division Two, zero from Divisions One, Four, Five and Six. Civil procedure cases ranged from 28.6% reversal in Division One to 75% in Division Six. Insurance decisions had a 100% reversal rate in Division Five, 50% in Divisions One through Three, and zero in Division Four. Constitutional law had the same wide spread as employment law: 100% reversal rate in Division Two; 50% in Divisions Three, Four and Five; and zero in Divisions One and Six.
Join us back here next time as we review the data for the rest of the state.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Tomosius (no changes).