Published and unpublished decisions

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Some of you all have asked that I forward the information we received. 

The original request was:

I am sending this our for another member of our staff who is not a member of this list.  He has tried LEXIS and WESTLAW, but they max out before they give the complete total.  He wants to know if there is some way of coming up with this number that he isn't thinking of.  I suggested he try this list to see if anyone has had to come up with these numbers before.

Anyone?

He has a professor who  needs to know the following (by the end of the day, of course):

1. Number of federal court decisions published last year (or most recent year), and the number or percent of these that are appellate decisions.
2. Number of state court decisions published last year (or most recent year), and the number of percent of these that are appellate decisions.
3. The percent (or number) of federal court decisions that were not published last year (or most recent year)
4. The percent (or number) of state court decisions that were not published last year (or most recent year).

She is interested in 2002.  She does have older statistics from an American U. law review article.

The following suggestions were received:

She might want to contact the National Center for State Courts directly.  The most recent Caseload statistics I could find on their web sites is 2001 published in 2002 http://www.ncsconline.org/D_Research/csp/CSP_Main_Page.html

Try using the dedicated Lexis/Westlaw sofware (rather than the web versions) as they won't max out on the numbers.

If you extend your statistical universe to state trial courts then the number of "unpublished" decisions will be astronomical and dwarf the number of published decisions.   For example our local county court of civil jurisdiction received over 42,000 requests for judicial intervention, each of these cases will generate one or more decisions during pre trial , trial and post trial litigation.  Only a tiny number of these decisions will ever be published and the vast majority of those "published" decisions appear only in the local legal newspaper ( New York Law Journal) not in a West reporter series. 

  Have you checked with the federal Administrative Office of the Courts yet?   I know our Calif. Admin Office ("AOC") compiles statistics on pub'd and unpub'd decisions.  They even break it down by broad subject category, e.g., criminal.   I'm not so sure I would rely on WEXIS for a definitive answer since sometimes they have duplicate copies of decisions.  An example of this is when they forget to delete an opinion as it was originally filed when they load the modified opinion.

A place to start is the U.S. Courts site.  Looks like there are some statistical tables that may contribute.  See Table S-3 at this page: http://www.uscourts.gov/judbus2002/contents.html

For Lexis, you can call their mani number in Dayton and ask for the competitive department - they will know the number on Lexis and will probably have the number for West.