This research brief describes an analysis of trends in civil caseloads, time to disposition, and patterns of case resolution in the federal district court system.
Delay in the disposition of civil cases in the Los Angeles Superior Court is a severe problem. Litigants who want a jury trial must now typically wait five years from the time they file their cases for the trials to begin.
Jury verdicts directly affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year and serve a bellwether function in plea bargaining and settlement negotiations.
Stephen Salant's analysis of multiple damages for private antitrust suits ("Treble Damage Awards in Private Lawsuits for Price Fixing," Journal of Political Economy, December 1987) is generalized. The neutrality result that multiple damages do not af...
Based on cases that reached jury verdict in Cook County, Illinois, and San Francisco, California, from 1960 to 1984, this report presents analytically derived answers to questions surrounding the award of punitive damages.
Drawing on social and cognitive psychology and on criminal jury research, Robert MacCoun outlines approaches that can provide data essential to legislative and judicial policymakers who seek to understand how civil juries arrive at decisions.
Advocates the use of systematic empirical research on civil jury behavior as an important tool in the policymaking process. The author discusses the methods that have been used for studying jury behavior,...
The research suggests that discrepancies among the statistics on tort litigation can be explained by the fact that there is no longer, if there ever was, a single tort system.
This paper is extracted from the Director's Report in the Institute for Civil Justice's (ICJ) Report on the First Six Program Years, April 1980-March 1986. It reviews findings of the ICJ's research on the civil justice system regarding (1) civil jury...
This paper draws on the author's analysis of civil jury verdicts rendered between 1960 and 1979 in Cook County, Illinois, and San Francisco, California.
This paper was originally presented at a symposium on consent decrees, and appeared in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1987. It explores the growing interest in consent degrees, by which lawsuits are resolved with the issuance of a judgme...
Reports the findings of a national survey to determine the current status of court-annexed arbitration among state and federal trial courts, and is an update of a similar survey conducted by The Institute for Civil Justice in 1980, and published as R2732
Represents the first systematic research on felony probationers. It is based on data on individuals convicted of selected serious felonies in Superior Court in California, who would have been likely candidates for prison.
This paper is the text of a briefing presented to the U.S. Department of Justice on the results of research performed at RAND and published in RAND/R-3186-NIJ, Granting Felons Probation: Public Risks and Alternatives.
Presents preliminary information on punitive damages awarded between 1959 and 1984 by juries in Cook County, Illinois, and San Francisco County, California.
