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Federal Judgeships: The General Accuracy of the Case-Related Workload Measures Used to Assess the Need for Additional District Court and Courts of Appeals Judgeships

GAO-03-788R Published: May 30, 2003. Publicly Released: May 30, 2003.
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Highlights

Biennially, the Judicial Conference, the federal judiciary's principal policymaking body, assesses the judiciary's needs for additional judgeships. If the Conference determines that additional judgeships are needed, it transmits a request to Congress identifying the number, type (courts of appeals, district, or bankruptcy), and location of the judgeships it is requesting. In 2003, the Judicial Conference sent to Congress requests for 93 new judgeships--11 for the courts of appeals, 46 for the district courts, and 36 for the bankruptcy courts. In assessing the need for additional judgeships, the Judicial Conference considers a variety of information, including responses to its biennial survey of individual courts, temporary increases or decreases in case filings, and other factors specific to an individual court. However, the Judicial Conference's analysis begins with the courts of appeals--weighted case filings and adjusted case filings, respectively. These two measures recognize, to different degrees, that the time demands on judges are largely a function of both the number and complexity of the cases on their dockets. Some types of cases may demand relatively little time and others may require many hours of work. Generally, each case filed in a district court is assigned a weight representing the average amount of judge time the case is expected to require. Using these measures, individual courts whose past case-related workload meets the threshold established by the Judicial Conference may be considered for additional judgeships. Authorized judgeships are the total number of judgeships authorized by statute for each district court and court of appeals. The Judicial Conference relies on these quantitative workload measures to be reasonably accurate rests in turn on the soundness of the methodology used to develop them. Whether those measures are reasonably accurate rests in turn on the soundness of the methodology used to develop them. Our objectives were to (1) determine whether the methods the Judicial Conference uses to quantitatively measure the case-related workload of district court and court of appeals judges results in a reasonably accurate measure of judges' case-related workload, (2) asses the reasonableness of any proposed methodologies to update the workload measures, and (3) obtain information from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts on the steps the Judiciary takes to ensure that the case filing data required for these workload measures are accurate.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Judicial Conference of the United States The Judicial Conference of the United states should update the district court case weights using a methodology that supports an objective, statistically reliable means of calculating the accuracy of the resulting weights.
Closed – Not Implemented
The Judicial Conference's Committee on Judicial Resources recognizes that the methodology to be used to update the district court case weights will not result in the development of objective, statistical measures of the accuracy of the resulting case weights. However, the Committee has concluded that the planned methodology will be sufficiently accurate for use in assessing future judgeship needs.
Judicial Conference of the United States The Judicial Conference of the United states should develop a methodology for measuring the case-related workload of courts of appeals judges that supports an objective, statistically reliable means of calculating the accuracy of the resulting workload measures and that addresses the special case characteristics of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Closed – Not Implemented
The Judicial Conference's Committee on Judicial Resources continues to believe that the Courts of Appeals are each unique, and their individual characteristics preclude developing a methodology that could be used to create more objective workload measures that could be applied to all courts.

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Topics

Courts (law)Evaluation methodsAppealsJudgesLabor forcePerformance measuresWork measurementLaw courtsCase weightsBankruptcy