Today's DJ reports Appellate lawyers task force to study decision delays -- The California Academy of Appellate Lawyers weighed in on a recent complaint to the state Commission on Judicial Performance regarding three 3rd District Court of Appeal justices, and said the evidence supporting the complaint suggests “that appellate justice has been egregiously delayed to the people the 3rd District serves.”
CAAL's statement is here.
- The academy has a long history of weighing in on particular appellate cases with letters or amicus briefs.
- The [3d District] has 11 of the state’s 106 appellate justices. This means it has just over 10% of the state’s appellate justices while serving more than 20% of the state’s population. The court has also been short one justice since M. Kathleen Butz announced her retirement in July.
- The Judicial Council has been compiling annual statistical reports on courts around the state since the 1990s. These have revealed the 3rd District faces a higher workload than other appellate courts.
- The most recent report, issued at the end of January, showed the 3rd District issued the most opinions per “judicial equivalent” than any other appellate court from 2018 to 2019, 12% more than the average. Yet this productivity still left the 3rd District with a far higher number of pending appeals than other courts.
On the federal side, Bloomberg has Sweetening Senior Status is Potential Path to Boost Judge Supply -- "About 40% of sitting U.S. circuit judges are senior."
- Federal judges at the appellate and district level can take senior status if they are over 65 and have served for at least 15 years. The calculation is referred to as “The Rule of 80.” Once judges are senior, they have more autonomy over their caseloads and retain the same salary as long as they work more than a set threshold.
- The roughly 113 senior judges at the circuit level currently account for about 40% of those sitting ... they participate in nearly a quarter of all federal appeals.
- One way to get federal appellate courts more judges without help from Congress is to convince more jurists to take senior status, a form of semi-retirement that allows them to continue hearing cases while freeing their seat for a nominee.
- Improving senior-status treatment could convince more judges to take it
- Caseloads per active judge have more than doubled despite the addition of nearly 70 regional circuit court judges in the past 50 years. The number of filings per active judge in the regional circuits increased from 148 in 1971 to 324 by 2017
- The last time seats were added to the courts of appeal was in 1990. The most recent request to Congress for more seats from the judiciary’s policy arm, the Judicial Conference, included five new appellate judges for the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit in addition to 65 trial judges.
Posts
