Law.com has Q&A: Inside a Law Professor's Push to Expand Federal Appellate Courts
- The last time Congress expanded the U.S. Courts of Appeals was in 1990, by 11 seats. In a new article in the Northwestern University Law Review, University of Florida Levin College of Law professor Merritt McAlister makes the case that adding more seats is overdue, and suggests ways to reform the current system of determining judicial need.
- I have three different proposals offering ways of accounting for judicial need. The first looks at whether a court is out of step with its sister courts based on publication rates, oral argument rates, reliance of staff attorneys, case filings, reversal rates, and the volume of terminations. The second is a more forward-looking model that considers how population trends might identify locations where more judicial help is needed.
- The final model uses the benchmark of per-judge filings set when Congress last added judges, which was around 240 filings per judge. If we keep the same benchmark that was the target then, you’d add about 29 judges overall in different numbers across the circuit courts. That’s a lot, but it reflects the fact that there hasn’t been a judgeship bill in awhile, and would involve significant additions to the Fifth, Ninth, and Eleventh circuits and smaller increases for the Second and Fourth circuits.
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