Do COA Judges Outwork their SCOKY Counterparts?
Posted by Trevor on July 5th, 2007 toDecisions
As of today, the SCOKY has rendered 106 Opinions, 20 Opinions and Orders in KBA Cases, and a handful of other Opinions and Orders to which the Supreme Court minutes do not include hyperlinks (and thus could be anything from a full-blown Opinion to a one-line “grant, vacate, and remand for reconsideration in light of [case]” Order). In any event, even if we assume that every Opinion and Order warrants the “Opinion” label, the total is no more than 140. Spread amongst the 7 Justices, that would be an average of 20 Opinions per Justice, or approximately 3 and 1/3 Opinions each per month.
During the same time frame, the Court of Appeals has rendered 704 Opinions. Spread among the 14 Court of Appeals Judges, that would be an average of just over 50 Opinions per Judge, or approximately 8 and 1/3 Opinions each per month. Of course, with the addition of the Senior Status Judges, there are really more than 14 Judges writing Opinions, so we re-ran the math and divided the 704 Opinions among 18 Judges. [We could come up with at least 5 Senior Status Judges (Paisley, Knopf, Buckingham, Henry, and Rosenblum) pretty quickly from reviewing the recent COA Minutes, and decided to divide them by 2 (because they are at least theoretically part-timers who are working 180 days a year) and then add another 1.5 Judges because (a) we figured we probably forgot about at least one Senior Status Judge, and (b) there were a smattering of “holdover” Opinions in the early months of the year from Judges who were no longer on the bench. (Justice Barber, for instance, rendered at least one Opinion a full 6 weeks after his term ended).] Even divided among 18 Judges, the 704 Opinions add up to 39 Opinions for each Judge, or an average of 6.5 Opinions each per month, i.e., approximately twice the output from the SCOKY Justices.
These statistics fall in the “food for thought” category. There could be any number of explanations for the COA’s ability to “double-up” the SCOKY in terms of productivity ranging from “the SCOKY’s Opinions are more thorough and address more issues” to “the SCOKY has to deal with all of those MDRs, which should be figured in there somewhere.” The extended page limits for briefs to the SCOKY might account for part of the difference. So, we thought we’d just toss the numbers out there and see if anyone else had any thoughts.
1 Response to “Do COA Judges Outwork their SCOKY Counterparts?”
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Some of the top of my head thoughts on the difference are: 1. The COA handles the first appellate bites at the apple and many of which are not that difficult and handled in short opinions which seem to contain canned intros on various topics and thus could easily qualify as "per curiums"in the federal system. 2. Bigger issues with potential policy implications take longer to reach a majority concensus and agreement on the majority opinion which is then compounded by concurring and dissenting opinions which are not common in COA. 3. Just as district court is the sheer volume leader compared to circuit court, the same might apply to COA versus SCOKY. 4. The volume of discretionary reviews can slow down the opinion pipeline with each petition being given serious consideration and time (not to mention petitions for rehearing). 5. The SCOKY justices seem to have more public responsibilities and visibilities than their COA counterparts which is a time drain. 6. Plus there is that one-month summer hiatus after the Bar Convention each year. ;) I was always under the impression that the Kentucky appellate courts were the most prolific in the nation. How does SCOKY compare in production compared to SCOTUS or even one of our sister states? The problem with comparing SCOKY to COA is an apples (not appeals) and oranges analogy which thus breaks down when drawn to absoute numbers and not all things being equal. However, I defer to those who have had an insider view as opposed to my sideline commentary.