Litigant Status and Trial Court Appeal Mobilization

The advantages held by haves over have nots in litigation have long fascinated scholars, with a long line of research revealing that litigant status often affects litigant resources, experience, and chances of overall success from trial courts to appellate courts. What has received considerably less attention, however, is how this status affects the decision to appeal. Bringing a new perspective to this important area holding implications for the shape and content of the judicial hierarchy, this study analyzes the decision of the losing federal district court litigant to appeal to the US courts of appeals. Utilizing an original database containing a sample of federal district court civil cases decided between 2000 and 2004, the results indicate, as predicted, that litigant status differentials affect whether there will be an appeal. This influence is further magnified when conditioned upon the relative costs of the appeal. These findings provide one of the first detailed examinations of litigant status and appeals coming from US trial courts and, simultaneously, offer the first empirical evidence to date that business litigants, like previously known government parties, are advantaged over individuals when deciding whether to appeal.     

Presentence Reports

This study investigated the use made by judges of background information provided in presentence reports in reaching their sentencing decisions. The presentence reports were furnished in a number of modified forms during an experimental manipulation in a real-life setting. By obtaining judges' provisional decisions during their reading of the report, along with their indications of what they found useful, the influence of different sections of information in the report was determined. All sections. were used by judges to some extent. The recommendation section was analyzed in some detail; while there was high agreement between the probation officer's recommendation and the judge's final disposal, judges tended to rate the recommedation low in terms of usefulness. However, analysis of changes to intended disposals, which occurred during reading of the reports, indicated that these recommendations were in fact quite influential, and even when there was not perfect agreement the recommendation produced a high frequency of shifts in the final disposal, bringing it closer to the recommendation than a preliminary decision had been. Reasons for these inconsistencies are considered in terms of the different methods used.