NCJ Number
94964
Date Published
1984
Length
75 pages
Annotation
The workloads of the U.S. courts of appeals, district courts, and bankruptcy courts are summarized for the 12 months ending March 31, 1984.
Abstract
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit docketed 1,000 new appeals, more than half of which arose from the combined decisions of the Merit Systems Protection Board (378 cases) and the U.S. district courts (220 cases). Large numbers were also received from the U.S. Claims Court (148 cases) and the Patent and Trademark Office (145 cases). As of March 31, 1984, there were 519 appeals pending on the docket of the Federal Circuit. A total of 31,125 new appeals were entered on the dockets of the 12 circuit courts, up 7.3 percent from 1983, and as of March 31, 1984, 22,757 appeals were pending. There were 259,798 civil cases filed in the U.S. district courts, up 11.5 percent from the previous year. The increase is due largely to the growing number of claims for Social Security benefits and to the efforts of the Federal Government to recover overpayments of veterans' benefits. During the same period, 36,257 criminal cases were filed as compared to 35,082 during the same period the year before. A total of 490,717 bankruptcy estates were filed in the U.S. bankruptcy courts, a decline of 9.8 percent from the previous year. Of these, 74,798 were business filings and 415,683 were nonbusiness filings. Seventy tables are included.