Rule of Law Commons^™

The Perilous Focus Shift From The Rule Of Law To Appellate Efficiency, Elizabeth Lee Thompson

Connecticut Law Review

We should be wary of reforms that are attractive in terms of saving time but have unnoticed substantive effects. . . . The great end for which courts are created is not efficiency. It is justice.

Charles Alan Wright (1966)¹

Some of the most significant—and by some estimations the most controversial— transformations of the federal appellate system occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of the effects are still felt today, including the shift from oral argument for all appeals and the view that study and disposition of each appeal were exclusively judicial tasks, to the adoption of …