The Rhode Island federal district court released its latest stats at the last Federal Bench/Bar Committee meeting (if you’re a lawyer and don’t attend these meetings, they contain lots of good stuff). The stats reveal some curious trends and notable comparisons to other federal districts. RICourtBlog compiled this information by comparing the statistics provided by local federal court staff to the gargantuan Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts’ Annual 2018 Report on the Federal Judiciary.
One curious trend is the similarity between criminal filings for the Rhode Island federal district court compared to the national data on criminal filings. Here is the table provided by Rhode Island federal court staff on criminal filings (the gray line below):
By comparison, here is the same data for criminal filings (the blue line below) in all federal district courts across the country:
Obviously, the trend in Rhode Island mirrors the national trend for criminal filings. Federal prosecutors are given ample discretion on bringing individual cases, but the national office of the United States Attorney General plays a substantial role in setting policy on which types of crimes to prosecute. The similarity between the Rhode Island federal district and the trend in national criminal filings raises questions on whether agency norms or some other practice leads to informal quotas. Correlation is not the same as causation, but the trends are notable based on prosecutorial discretion in bringing cases.
Another notable statistic is the number of cases filed in Rhode Island. According to Rhode Island federal court staff, parties filed 678 civil cases in the federal court in 2018:
The Rhode Island federal court has three authorized judgeships, but currently has only two sitting judges. The third judgeship has been pending forever, and by that I mean since Oct. 1, 2015. As reporter Katie Mulvaney has noted, maybe the third time will be the charm for nominee Mary McElroy to become the third Article III judge to the local roster. With two sitting judges, the civil and criminal case load in 2018 works out to 412 cases per judge.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts looks at these same stats differently. It uses a metric called “weighted filings per authorized judgeship” (click this link and scroll down for a description of this term of art) to gauge the judicial workload of each district. Under this metric, “case types that on average are more time-consuming for district judges to resolve receive weight values greater than 1.00, whereas case types that are less time-consuming receive lower weights. For example, in the district court weighted filings system, each antitrust case is weighted as 3.72, and each criminal fraud defendant is weighted as 1.76, but a defaulted student loan case receives a weight of 0.16.”
Somewhat surprisingly, the Rhode Island federal district court is at the lower end of “weighted filings” compared to the 94 federal court districts across the country. Nationally, the number of weighted filings per authorized judgeship was 513 in 2018, but Rhode Island had only 308 weighted filings per authorized judgeship. I created a spreadsheet from data on the Administrative Office for U.S. Courts’ website (click here for the comparison), and the Rhode Island federal district court has 308 weighted filings. This makes it the 13th least busiest federal court (out of the 94 in the country), as measured by “weighted filings per authorized judgeship.” This data is obviously skewed, because it assumes that the Rhode Island federal court has three judges, not the current roster of two. With only two judges, presumably the number of weighted filings would be 462. Apparently, the federal judiciary recommends 430 weighted filings per authorized judgeship, so Rhode Island is either way below or slightly above this number, depending on how the judges are counted.
One other surprising statistic is the dearth of civil and criminal trials in the Rhode Island federal district court. There were only 6 trials last year, and that continues a downward trend:
While it is not surprising that trials are on the downswing, what is surprising is the remarkably fewer number of trials in Rhode Island compared to the other federal district courts that make up the First Circuit. According to the 2018 Administrative Office Report, (this link has the spreadsheet on the number of trials), here’s the breakdown:
- Maine – 60 trials.
- Massachusetts: 147 trials.
- Rhode Island: 7 trials (this counts one more trial than local federal court statistics, probably because the fiscal year is counted differently by the local federal district court versus the national agency).
- Puerto Rico: 63 trials.
- New Hampshire: 33 trials.
Does the difference in case load between the districts explain the lower number of trials in Rhode Island? Probably not, as evidenced by civil case load statistics for the other districts. Maine, for example, had 519 new civil cases in 2018, and 14 civil trials. New Hampshire had 1,154 new civil cases and 15 civil trials. These ratios are much higher than Rhode Island’s trial numbers.
Comparing the Rhode Island federal court stats to the national stats helps identify some interesting trends. It also lends insight into the effect of limited jurisdiction on the federal judiciary generally. The federal appeals and district courts across the country handed 407,926 cases in 2018. State courts, which are typically courts of general jurisdiction that hear additional types of cases, hear many more matters compared to federal courts. In Rhode Island alone — a State that fights well above its weight with only 1 million residents — the state court system handled 565,400 court hearings, 1.8 million document filings, and 172,616 new matters (according to 2017 statistics, the most recent available). These state court numbers are a little higher than the Rhode Island federal court numbers.