The Changing Role of the United States Courts of Appeals: The Flow of Litigation Revisited

Abstract

In this article, the authors build upon the work of J. Woodford Howard to examine the role of the courts of appeals in the 1980s. They explore the changes in the nature of the business of the courts since the 1960s, the increasing demands on the courts, and the issue of whether the diversity among circuits that Howard found currently prevails. Additionally, the authors begin to examine the nature of the increasing number of cases that are disposed of without a published opinion. Diversity among all twelve circuits in both business and behavior dominates the results. Although criminal cases have not overwhelmed the courts, demands have increased and judicial resources have not kept pace with the caseload. The fact that the Supreme Court supervises the courts of appeals to an even lesser extent than it did in the 1960s attests to the growing role of the federal intermediate appellate judiciary in policymaking.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.