This time, we’re concluding our four-part post, both here and on the Illinois Supreme Court Review, discussing some of the academic literature on panel effects in appellate decision-making. Today, we’re looking at “Judging the Voting Rights Act,” 108 Columbia Law Rev. 1 (2008), by Professors Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles.  The authors began by collecting every published Federal decision decided pursuant to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act since 1982. The…

Earlier this week, we began a four-part post at the Illinois Supreme Court Review briefly reviewing some of the leading academic literature on the phenomenon of “panel effects” – the theory that appellate panels are a collective decision-maker rather than a group of individual decision-makers, and thus a particular judge’s vote is influenced to some degree by the characteristics of the other judges he or she is sitting with. Today, we’re looking at two more…

We conclude our series by reviewing the data for criminal, quasi-criminal and juvenile justice cases between the years 2010 and 2020.  Once again, Los Angeles led, accounting for 142 cases.  Riverside County was next, followed by San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Sacramento and Alameda counties.  San Francisco, which was among the leaders in civil cases, ranked sixteenth in criminal cases over the past eleven years. An additional sixteen jurisdictions produced between two and…

This week, we’re concluding our three-week multi-part post on the originating jurisdictions for the California Supreme Court’s civil and criminal cases between 1990 and 2020.  In this post, we’re finishing the civil side of the docket, reviewing the years 2010 to 2020. As usual, we omit the leading jurisdiction, Los Angeles County, from the Table for the sake of readability.  Los Angeles produced 120 civil cases between 2010 and 2020.  Next was Orange County, with…

Between 2000 and 2009, the California Supreme Court decided 617 criminal, quasi-criminal and juvenile justice cases.  Los Angeles County accounted for 188 of those cases.  Orange County was second, followed by San Diego, Santa Clara, Alameda, Riverside and Sacramento counties. Twenty additional jurisdictions which produced more than one case apiece during these years are reported in Table 1501.  Only four jurisdictions produced one case apiece. Join us back here next week as we review the…

Today, we’re reporting the originating jurisdictions for the Supreme Court between the years 2000 and 2009.  We omit Los Angeles County from the Table to make it more easily readable.  Los Angeles County accounted for 147 civil cases between 2000 and 2009. San Francisco County was twelfth in population but second in criminal cases.  Next were the second and third most populous counties, San Diego and Orange, followed by Sacramento (the eighth most populous county). …

In Table 1496, we report the jurisdictions where the Court’s criminal cases originated between 1990 and 1999.  Los Angeles County accounted for 111 cases.  The State Bar Court was next, followed by Orange County, the third most populous county in the state.  Santa Clara County, the sixth most populous county, was next followed by San Diego County, the second biggest county in the state.  Riverside County, the fourth most populous county in the state, was…