Doctrine, District Courts, and Docketology

• Activity Number: 90
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2007 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Committee on Law and Justice Statistics
• Author(s): Alan J. Izenman*+ and David Hoffman
• Companies: Temple University and Temple University
• Keywords: judicial opinions ; dispositions ; on-line databases ; case-complexity index ; HLM ; survival analysis

Abstract

An important topic of interest to legal scholars is under what conditions will a judge in a civil case decide to write an opinion in a case, instead of merely an order. Such an "opinion or order" decision tends to be reflected in whether the decision is published in either Westlaw or Lexis. To investigate the conditions under which a judge decides to write an opinion or an order, we collected a number of predictor variables related to the status of each judicial decision in a large random sample of civil cases from each of four jurisdictions, Maryland, California (ND), Pennsylvania (ED), and New York (SD), during 2003. Certain cases were not completed at the time of data collection, and so get treated as censored data. We describe an hierarchical linear model that helps deal with the complicated aspects of this question, and we present a "case complexity index" for each case.