Today, we're beginning a new multi-part series of posts, looking at the reversal rates for each District and Division of the Appellate Court by the area of law involved in the case. First up: the First District Appellate Court in the 1990s. There was only one environmental law and one election law case, and each was reversed. Three areas had a 75% reversal rate: domestic relations, property law and commercial law. The reversal rate for tort law was 65.7%. In civil procedure, it was 65.6%, and for government and administrative law cases, just a bit lower still - 65%. The reversal rate for constitutional law was 54.6%. Half of the wills and estates cases were reversed. The reversal rates for both contract and arbitration cases were 40%. Insurance was slightly lower at 38.5%. One-third of workers compensation cases were reversed. The lowest subject matter reversal rates for First District cases were in tax law - 25% - and employment law - 20%.
Reviewing the divisions of the First District for outliers, tort decisions were reasonably uniform. The reversal rate from Division One was 87.5%, down to a low of 50% for Division Six. Government and administrative law decisions were similar - 50% from Divisions One, Two and Four, 80% from Division Three. The lowest overall reversal rate - employment law - also saw the widest variance: 100% for Division Two, zero from Divisions One, Four, Five and Six. Civil procedure cases ranged from 28.6% reversal in Division One to 75% in Division Six. Insurance decisions had a 100% reversal rate in Division Five, 50% in Divisions One through Three, and zero in Division Four. Constitutional law had the same wide spread as employment law: 100% reversal rate in Division Two; 50% in Divisions Three, Four and Five; and zero in Divisions One and Six.
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