Deborah Smith
Caseload Highlights: The Appellate Section of the State Court Guide to Statistical Reporting
Appellate CourTools
Supplemental Survey of Civil Appeals, 2001
The most common structure for a state appellate court system involves one court of last resort with largely discretionary review, commonly called a supreme court, and one intermediate appellate court with largely mandatory review. Because of this jurisdiction, the intermediate appellate court is the court of final review for the vast majority of state court appeals. Ten states are without an intermediate appellate court. Various combinations based on mandatory versus discretionary jurisdiction, size of the courts, use of panels, geographical divisions, and division between criminal and civil jurisdiction by court exist in the state appellate systems.
Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may be borrowed from the NCSC Library; call numbers are provided.
Table of filing fees for state intermediate appellate courts and courts of last resort.
Appellate Court Technology Vendors from the Court Technology Vendor List.
NCSC Area of Expertise.
Civil Appeals Profile Database and Civil Appeals Profile Reports. The Civil Appeals Profile Database is a compilation of appellate court practices and procedures for civil cases on appeal. Users can view all procedures for a single court or compare procedures across courts, given their particular interest.
This memorandum explains the single justice court in Massachusetts, which is a method used to expedite the disposition of certain interlocutory rulings.
A report on the timeliness of state supreme courts. According to the Appellate Court Performance Standards, expedition is one of the three primary goals state appellate courts should try to achieve. The other values are fairness and consistency.
This document provides a brief description of selected appellate courts with civil jurisdiction including number of judges, jurisdiction over civil matters, appellate procedures, docketing practices, and mediation/settlement conferences.
This study analyzes the function of the appellate court staff in the appellate court system. The research addresses four different areas of study -- the lack of comparative study within this field, the nature of not adequately defining the varying roles within the appellate staff, the lack of comparison of the differing legal roles within the appellate staff, and the lack of investigation about what types of casework the legal staff pursues.
This report provides a comparative analysis of appellate courts including their organization, the steps that appeals follow in each court, the size and composition of the appellate bench, and the management of appellate courts.
This report finds that appellate courts with more resources are more likely to render decisions faster. Uses Pennsylvania as an example of a successful court, and explains how the state maximizes resources and efficiency.
This book investigates what accounts for the differences in appellate processing times among appellate courts. The author establishes eleven reasons to explain the differences in processing times.
State supreme courts have begun to grasp the many ways technology can connect the public with courts. This article will reveiw some of the main trends in state supreem courts' use of the Internet to educate the public about their work.
This report is a review of the Iowa Court's reorganization plan and an analysis of the workflow process. Iowa uses the "deflective system" in which all cases are initially filed in the Supreme Court followed by a decision regarding retention or transfer to the Court of Appeals. Proposed alternatives to improve efficiency involved the areas of review and decisions on motions, preparation of case statements and routing cases, workflow related to adjudicative functions, and organizational structure.
This article presents the findings of an investigation of the time expended by fourteen state supreme courts to resolve direct appeals of capital convictions and sentences.
This report studies the outcomes of first-level appeals courts by examining criminal appeals in five states.
This short report was created to assist appellate courts in streamlining the dependency appeals process. The pamphlet introduces guidelines such as assembling a task force, developing a plan, drafting a rule, and considering strategies for further improvement.
This book examines the effectiveness of expediting appeals for dependency cases in state courts.
In this article, the authors investigate the extent to which threshold rules are raised in administrative agency litigation and explore the nature of their use.
This study examines the Supreme Court's agenda-setting records. Nearly all aspects of the Supreme Court's decision-making process occur outside the public eye and any attempt to understand them is done by analyzing voting ways. The authors want to validate this type of research through past judge's papers made public.
This report focuses on the development of the court's workload and on the steps that the court has taken and will continue to take to meet workload and resource challenges.
The primary objective of this workload study is to address the case backlog and identify possible methods for reducing it. The study's three critical objectives are: identifying bottlenecks in the processing of appellate cases, proposing methods to reduce backlog, and developing case complexity descriptions that will allow the Court to better track workload trends.
The purpose of this workload assessment model is to provide an objective uniform, and realistic methodology for judgeship needs and resource allocation for the Colorado Court of Appeals.
This report provides information concerning the use of short opinions in four state intermediate appellate courts. They are: New Jersey Superior Court, Appellate Division; Alabama Criminal Court of Appeal; Alabama Civil Court of Appeal; Pennsylvania Superior Court; Florida District Courts of Appeal.
In an era when technological and cultural changes abound, courts must keep pace or risk the erosion of public trust and confidence. The deployment of modern case management systems that facilitate the objective measurement of institutional court performance over time is a bulwark in the defense of public justice.
This article describes performance measurement and performance management in state appellate courts.
This report provides information on performance standards for the states' appellate courts. Some of the topics included in this handbook are protecting the rule of law, promoting the rule of law, preserving the public trust, and using public resources efficiently.
These fifteen standards of performance pertain to four performance areas: protecting the rule of law, promoting the rule of law, preserving the public trust, and using public resources efficiently.
This handbook is designed to benefit attorneys and pro se litigants.
The NCSC collected these data as part of the Civil Justice Survey of State Courts, 2001-2005, Supplemental Study of Civil Appeals with funding from BJS. This study examined 1,204 tort, contract, or real property appeals from civil bench and jury trials held in 2001 in 46 large, urban courts.