The new edition of Examining the Work of State Courts reports that total state court caseloads continued their steady decline, dropping an additional 5 percent between 2014 and 2015. Criminal, juvenile, and domestic relations cases leveled off from 2014 to 2015, while civil and traffic/violations cases continued to drop. The reasons for the decline, which began in 2008, include reductions in budgets and services throughout the criminal and juvenile justice system, changes in driving habits and automobile technologies, a decline in the divorce rate, and alternative modes of dispute resolution and simply discouragement with a slow, complicated, and expensive civil justice system. Appellate caseloads have followed the same downward trend, declining an additional 3 percent from 2014 to 2015. Examining documents these caseload trends, while the Court Statistics Project’s online DataViewer tool allows readers to explore these data by sorting, filtering, and exporting the data.
