Appellate Division on Appeal: The Justices' Rates of Agreement, Rejection, and Vindication by the Court of Appeals

Appellate Division on Appeal: The Justices' Rates of Agreement, Rejection, and Vindication by the Court of Appeals

New York State’s intermediate appeals justices vary widely in their rates of success on review by the Court of Appeals. At one end, there are those justices whose votes and opinions, whether majority or dissent, are consistently ratified by the high court. On the other end, there are those whose positions are regularly rejected. This study examined every non-unanimous decision of each of the New York State Appellate Division rendered between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2005, which was in turn reviewed on appeal by the Court of Appeals by June 2005, the point at which the data collection for this study was completed. There are identifiable patterns that appear, at least on a preliminary examination, to correspond to high rates of Court of Appeals agreement and rejection. One example, among many others, suggests that voting records that largely favored the individual over government in civil litigation corresponded to low success upon Court of Appeals review. What is suggested by the initial indications here, is worthy of further research.

Albany Law Review

2007

PDF

English

Jason A. Cherna, Jessica Blain-Lewis & Vincent Martin Bonventre, Appellate Division on Appeal: The Justices' Rates of Agreement, Rejection, and Vindication by the Court of Appeals, 70 ALB. L. REV. 983 (2007).

Center for Judicial Process