Resolution of Appellate Litigation

Appellate courts—both state and federal—have experienced dramatic increases in court business since 1960. A popular policy for meeting this demand has been to encourage litigants to end their disputes short of decision by the judges. This article reports the results of the first controlled experiment in the federal appellate court system to test the efficacy of two innovative court procedures designed to meet the litigation explosion swamping the federal courts of appeals: court-supervised confer ences with appellate advocates and court-issued orders to control the speed of the appellate process in individual cases. Both procedures are radical departures from traditional practice. The results from the experiment indicate that the procedures did not significantly reduce appeals, produced negligible improvement in case quality, and had mixed effects in expediting the appellate process. The evidence from the experiment weakens the theory that gave birth to the policy. Nevertheless, further controlled experimentation under different conditions is essential in order to deter mine whether and to what extent the policy can be effective.