Federal Courts. Review by Courts of Appeals. Appellate Court Reverses Trial Judge's Determination That Damages Not Excessive

1952 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 1064
Keyword(s):  
Federal Courts ◽  
Appellate Court ◽  
Courts Of Appeals

Collegial Courts: Panel Decision-Making and the U.S. Courts of Appeals

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela C. Corley ◽  
Wendy L. Martinek
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Appellate Court ◽  
Courts Of Appeals ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
Appeals Process ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The U.S

The three-judge panel mechanism by which the courts of appeals process almost all (though not quite all) of their cases affords scholars unique opportunities to explore how appellate court decision-making may transcend being merely the sum of its parts. Specifically, court of appeals judges pursue their decision-making responsibilities as part of a collegial group, and thus it is important to understand how being a member of a multimember court influences their behavior.

scholarly journals "Downright Indifference": Examining Unpublished Decisions in the Federal Courts of Appeals

2020 ◽  
pp. 533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merritt McAlister
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Courts Of Appeals ◽  
Human Consumption ◽  
Appellate Courts ◽  
Minimum Standards ◽  
Rubber Stamp ◽  
Second Tier ◽  
First Time

Nearly 90 percent of the work of the federal courts of appeals looks nothing like the opinions law students read in casebooks. Over the last fifty years, the so-called “unpublished decision” has overtaken the federal appellate courts in response to a caseload volume “crisis.” These are often short, perfunctory decisions that make no law; they are, one federal judge said, “not safe for human consumption.” The creation of the inferior unpublished decision also has created an inferior track of appellate justice for a class of appellants: indigent litigants. The federal appellate courts routinely shunt indigent appeals to a second-tier appellate process in which judicial staff attorneys resolve appeals without oral argument or meaningful judicial oversight. For the system’s most vulnerable participants, the promise of an appeal as of right often becomes a rubber stamp: “You lose.” This work examines the product of that second-class appellate justice system by filling two critical gaps in the existing literature. First, it compiles comprehensive data on the use of unpublished decisions across the circuits over the last twenty years. The data reveal, for the first time, that the courts’ continued—and increasing—reliance on unpublished decisions has no correlation to overall caseload volume. Second, it examines the output of the second-tier appellate justice system from the perspective of the litigants themselves. Relying on a procedural justice framework, this work develops a taxonomy of unpublished decisions and argues for minimum standards for reason-giving in most unpublished decisions.

scholarly journals Of Whites and men: How gender and race impact authorship of published and unpublished opinions in the US courts of appeals

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 205316801876286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Tillman ◽  
Rachael K. Hinkle
Keyword(s):  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Courts Of Appeals ◽  
Stare Decisis ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Supreme Court ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
Circuit Courts

While authorship assignment has been studied extensively in the US Supreme Court, relatively little is known about such decisions in the intermediate federal courts. Moreover, what we know about circuit courts relates only to published opinions (those which constitute precedent under the doctrine of stare decisis and, thus, influence policy). Little is known about authorship of less influential unpublished opinions. Distinguishing between the costs, benefits, and risks inherent in authoring published versus unpublished opinions, we develop and test theoretical expectations about how demographic characteristics of opinion assignors and assignees influence authorship across opinion type. We conduct empirical tests using an exhaustive original dataset containing all authored dispositive circuit panel opinions issued in 2012. The results reveal that White and male judges are more likely to assign White and male judges to write published opinions and less likely to assign them to write unpublished opinions. The substantive sizes of the discrepancies are somewhat modest, but our results indicate that judges from historically disadvantaged groups have fewer opportunities to shape policy and they shoulder a disproportionately larger share of the routine chore of resolving individual cases.

In the [Source] C\ode of the Conquerors

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-137
Author(s):  
Nicholas Ravotti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Digital Divide ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Appellate Court ◽  
Research Database ◽  
Culturally Appropriate ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Trial Court ◽  
The Law

The practice of law requires not only an understanding of the law itself (i.e., what the law “says”), but also the ability to conduct proper legal research to formulate cogent legal arguments in support of one's case. For attorneys practicing before state and federal courts in the United States, this is accomplished through the use of legal research databases that catalog and archive nearly all state and federal trial court and appellate court opinions. For attorneys who practice before the 573 federally-recognized Indian tribal courts, this task is far more complex. This chapter discusses the need for a culturally-appropriate legal research database to bridge the digital divide in tribal courts.

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