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Plaintiphobia In State Courts Redux? An Empirical Study Of State Court Trials On Appeal, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise
Plaintiphobia In State Courts Redux? An Empirical Study Of State Court Trials On Appeal, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Prior federal and state civil appeals studies show that appeals courts overturn jury verdicts more than bench decisions and that defendants fare better than plaintiffs on appeal. Attitudinal and selection effect hypotheses may help explain an appellate court tilt that favors defendants. This study builds on and extends our prior work on state civil appeals and examines a comprehensive state court civil appeals data set to test leading theories on appellate outcomes as well as to explore the relation between plaintiff success at trial and on appeal. Using data from 40 different states and 141 counties on 8,872 completed civil …
Plaintiphobia In State Courts? An Empirical Study Of State Court Trials On Appeal, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise
Plaintiphobia In State Courts? An Empirical Study Of State Court Trials On Appeal, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Prior federal civil appellate studies show that appeals courts overturn jury verdicts more than bench decisions and that defendants fare better than plaintiffs on appeal. Attitudinal and selection effect hypotheses may explain the appellate court tilt favoring defendants. This study presents the first statistical models of the appeals process for a comprehensive set of state court civil trials to test theories on appellate outcomes. Using data from 46 large counties on 8,038 trials and 549 concluded appeals, we find that appellate reversal rates for jury trials and defendant appeals exceed reversal rates for bench trials and plaintiff appeals. The reversal …