|
|
|
|
The Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts issues an annual report each year, discussing the state of the federal judiciary. Each annual report has a supplemental chart showing how many appellate matters are ruled upon in each circuit "without comment". Here are the supplemental charts for each year starting from 1997:
In a report called "Case Management Procedures in the Federal Courts of Appeals" by the Federal Judicial Center 2000, on page 20, the following is said about the cases classified "without comment": Reasoned v. "without comment" opinions. Table 12 shows the percentage of merit terminations that are disposed of in each court "without comment," as defined by the individual court. There seems to be broad agreement that summary orders in the nature of the one-word "Affirmed" disposition fall in this category and are coded as such. After that, uniformity ends. Although dispositions are reported by the courts to the AO [Administrative Office] to be "reasoned" or "without comment" (as well as published/unpublished, signed/unsigned), there is no uniformity of application of the instructions regarding the definition of a "reasoned" opinion. Some courts report one-paragraph "appeal without merit" opinions as reasoned opinions. Other courts use one-word summary affirmances and characterize them, in accordance with the intructions, as "without comment" dispositions. Arguably, these are functionally equivalent dispositions, so it is not possible to reliably compare the court of appeals on this dimension using nationally reported data. Last updated on 01/09/2005 |
|
Home Send comments about this web page to tomglass@juryduty.org |
