The popular press frequently reports exorbitant money damage awards by juries. These stories cause paroxysms in the business community because juries are viewed as favoring plaintiffs over corporations. A growing body of literature has examined aspects of this complex issue, but within a limited framework. Prior studies, which are based on data from the early 1980s or before, tend to focus on federal court cases, primarily product liability and medical malpractice torts, only jury verdicts, and single jurisdictions when state courts are included. The objective of this article is to contribute to the literature by examining all tort cases reaching either a bench or a jury trial verdict during a sample period in 1989 in twenty‐seven general jurisdiction trial courts. Research is organized around three basic questions. What do torts look like? Do particular types of plaintiffs/defendants gain a higher percent of favorable verdicts? When plaintiffs are awarded money damages, what is the importance of litigant status, while controlling for other factors, in influencing the size of the awards? The article begins by describing the landscape of torts ‐ the typical configurations of the contending litigants, the composition of torts by area of law, the types of trials, verdict patterns, and the average size of awards. Basic contours of the landscape reflect the elemental facts that individuals generally are plaintiffs in these cases and the opposite tendency of corporations, insurance companies, and governments to appear as defendants. Next a model is outlined and tested to determine how strongly different possible determinants shape the size of tort awards in the twenty‐seven state trial courts. Does the size of the award depend on the configuration of the parties after taking into account the type of tort, the type of trial, the length of disposition time, and the state in which the court is located? The results indicate that the group of variables representing the various pairing of litigants accounts for most of the explained variation in award size. These findings support the notion that the status of the litigants is an important factor in influencing awards. Because the variables representing some of the individual states are also significant, the evidence also suggests no single, uniform pattern applies across all the courts. Instead, the state context shapes the basic parameters of plaintiff and defendant success.

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Delay in the processing of criminal cases has long been viewed as a serious national problem. Substantial differences exist among courts in the average time it takes to resolve both felony and misdemeanor cases, with past research producing inconclusive results on the causes of observed variation. In response, and with the support of the Arnold Foundation, the objective of this article is to highlight predictable variation in the timeliness of criminal case processing and how this knowledge supports court efforts to become more expeditious. Drawing on an extensive set of felony and misdemeanor cases resolved in seven Colorado courts, statistical analysis uncovers important patterns in the composition of criminal caseloads and clarifies how composition influences case duration. Moreover, similarities in the makeup of criminal caseloads show the utility of fundamental principles of criminal caseflow management and how courts benefit from being assessed comparatively against established performance benchmarks.

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Actions by state prisoners have comprised a large and growing body of litigation in the U.S. federal courts over the past thirty years. State prisoners can challenge the validity of their state trial court convictions (habeas corpus petitions) and the constitutionality of the conditions of their confinement to state prisons and jails (Section 1983 lawsuits). Currently, one out of every five civil cases filed in the federal system is brought by a jail or prison inmate. When in the past did these cases begin to arise? What is the present trend? What does the future hold concerning the number of cases likely to be filed? These questions are at the heart of the current research. Care is needed in addressing these queries because it is neither easy nor obvious to know what propels the volume of litigation. Moreover, the future is especially difficult to predict in light of recent legislation adopted by the United States Congress to limit the number of habeas corpus petitions and the number of Section 1983 lawsuits filed each year. The unique contribution of the current research is threefold. First, an improved methodology is used to describe past patterns and to forecast future trends. Simply stated, prisoner litigation is hypothesized to be related to the number of prisoners. As the number of prisoners increases, the volume of litigation increases proportionately. What is not obvious about this relationship is that it has persisted over the past decades despite substantial changes in legal doctrines designed to affect the filing of the litigation. Second, the effects of two major congressional actions passed in 1996 to limit prisoner litigation are examined and assessed for their success in achieving their intended objectives. The first of these, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which sought to restrict habeas corpus petitions, is judged to have virtually no impact. The second piece of legislation, the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act, which sought to curtail lawsuits against correctional officials, appears to have lowered the volume of litigation in the short‐term, but has not disrupted the underlying link between the number of prisoners and the number of lawsuits. Finally, estimates are made of the future volume of litigation and the corresponding number of federal judges needed to resolve prisoner litigation. These estimates have the advantage of being based on significant statistical relationships and accounting for the effects of recent congressional action.