This time, we’re beginning a new series, looking at the geographic spread of the Court’s civil docket. We’ll assess two issues: (1) does the spread of civil cases track – at least across longer periods – the distribution of population; and (2) how does the distribution of cases change over time.
We begin with the First District for the years 1990 through 1999. Population distribution is reported in Table 1483, which shows the percentage of the total District population accounted for by each county. Alameda County is the biggest county in the First, with 26.86% of the District. Contra Costa has 17.65%, San Francisco 14.45% and San Mateo accounts for 13.16% of the District. Sonoma is 8.53% and Solano County is 7.34%. The remaining counties are smaller.
The distribution of cases for the nineties did not track the population distribution. The Court decided 38 cases from San Francisco County, 16 from Alameda and 13 from San Mateo County. The Court had nine cases from Contra Costa County, eight from Solano and seven from Marin County. The remaining counties contributed only scattered cases during the nineties.
Next time we’ll look at the data for the Second District.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Giuseppe Milo (no changes).