Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-kc5xb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-08T03:03:15.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - When Winning Is Not Enough

Prevailing-Party Civil Appeals in State Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2019

Yun-chien Chang
Affiliation:
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
Get access

Summary

While attention to the “vanishing trial” occupies scholarly attention, empirical work on civil appeals remains comparatively underdeveloped. Whatever is known about the small world of civil appeals is dominated by a focus on traditional appeals; that is, appeals initiated by the party who lost at trial. Comparatively far less is known about the much smaller number of prevailing-party appeals. Exploiting data from one of the largest collections of data on civil litigation in the United States, this chapter explores and describes the general empirical contours of prevailing-party civil appeals. One striking finding involves the asymmetrical distribution of prevailing-party appeals’ success. While traditional appeals favor of defendant-appellants prevailing-party appeals, by contrast, favor plaintiff-appellants. In terms of success with disrupting unfavorable trial court rulings, prevailing-party appeals succeeded at a rate that surpasses the success rate for traditional appeals. The core descriptive findings persist in an array of regression models of the decision to initiate a prevailing-party appeal as well as its success. While results in this study identify important aspects of prevailing-party appeals, particularly their asymmetric distribution of success, data limitations preclude a nuanced assessment of the competing theoretical interpretations of these findings.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Clermont, Kevin M., and Eisenberg, Theodore. 2001. Appeal From Jury or Judge Trial: Defendants’ Advantage. American Law & Economic Review 3: 125–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clermont, Kevin M., and Eisenberg, Theodore. 2002. Plaintiphobia in the Appellate Courts: Civil Rights Really Do Differ from Negotiable Instruments. University of Illinois Law Review 2002: 947–77.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Theodore. 1990. Testing the Selection Effect: A New Theoretical Framework with Empirical Tests. Journal of Legal Studies 19: 337–58.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Theodore, and Farber, Henry S.. 2013. Why Do Plaintiffs Lose Appeals? Biased Trial Courts, Litigious Losers, or Low Trial Win Rates? American Law & Economic Review 15: 73109.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Theodore, and Heise, Michael. 2009. Plaintiphobia in State Courts? An Empirical Study of State Court Trials on Appeal. Journal of Legal Studies 38: 121–55.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Theodore, and Heise, Michael. 2015. Plaintiphobia in State Courts Redux? An Empirical Study of State Court Trials on Appeal. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 12: 100–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, Theodore, Neil LaFountain, Brian Ostrom, David, Rottman, and Wells, Martin T.. 2002. Juries, Judges, and Punitive Damages: An Empirical Study. Cornell Law Review 87: 743–82.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Theodore, and Schwab, Stewart J. 1989. What Shapes Perceptions of the Federal Court System? University of Chicago Law Review 56: 501–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engstrom, Nora Freeman. 2018. The Diminished Trial. Unpublished manuscript. Stanford University, September.Google Scholar
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, 2016. Washington, DC: U.S. Governmental Printing Office.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc. 2004. The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 1(1): 459570.Google Scholar
Heise, Michael. 2000. Justice Delayed?: An Empirical Analysis of Civil Case Disposition Time. Case Western Reserve Law Review 50: 813–49.Google Scholar
Holm, Anders, and Jaeger, Mads M.. 2011. Dealing with Selection Bias in Educational Transition Models: The Bivariate Probit Selection Model. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 29: 311–22.Google Scholar
Lee, Yoon-Ho, and Klerman, Daniel. 2016. The Priest-Klein Hypotheses: Proofs and Generality. International Review of Law and Economics 48: 5976.Google Scholar
Posner, Richard A. 2014. Economic Analysis of Law (9th ed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer.Google Scholar
Priest, George L., and Klein, Benjamin. 1984. The Selection of Disputes for Litigation. Journal of Legal Studies 13: 155.Google Scholar
Revesz, Richard L. 2000. Litigation and Settlement in the Federal Appellate Courts: Impact of Panel Selection Procedures on Ideologically Divided Courts. Journal of Legal Studies 29: 685710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, Martin. 1980. Appeal. Law & Society Review 14: 629–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shavell, Steven. 1995. The Appeals Process as a Means of Error Correction. Journal of Legal Studies 24: 379426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2004. Civil Justice Survey of State Courts, 2001[United States] (computer file). Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (Study No. 3957).Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2006. Supplemental Survey of Civil Appeals, 2001[United States] (computer file). Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (Study No. 4539).Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2009. Civil Justice Survey of State Courts, 2005 [United States] (computer file). Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (Study No. 23862).Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2012. Civil Justice Survey of Trials on Appeal, 2005 [United States] (computer file). Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (Study No. 32501).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×