Empirical Conjectures About the Effects of Raising the Jurisdictional Amount
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As my Civ Pro colleagues periodically remind me, we’re likely overdue for an increase to jurisdictional thresholds. Even if they’re correct, however, what might be the expected (and unexpected) consequences of various increases to jurisdictional thresholds? A recent paper by Steven Gensler (Oklahoma) and Roger Michalski (Oklahoma), The Million Dollar Diversity Docket, puts these counter-factual questions to data. And what they find should interest more than procedeuralists.
The authors hand-coded data from five (non-randomly selected) federal districts (Minnesota, Georgia Northern, New Jersey, Texas Northern, and Utah). From each of these districts they selected a random draw of diversity jurisdiction cases based on Federal Judicial Center (“FJC”) data on cases completed in 2018, resulting in 2,896 usable cases. The paper’s methodological move involves substituting the temporal component in survival analysis with a measure of jurisdictional amount. That is, instead of asking on which day a machine fails, we ask at which jurisdictional amount a case fails. To do so, the authors estimated modified KaplanMeier survival functions and Cox Proportional Hazard Regression models.
The paper’s main takeaway is that jurisdictional amounts “are not neutral throttles. They do not modulate all cases evenhandedly. Instead, different areas of law, different parts of the country, and different litigants are more affected by changes in the jurisdictional amount than others.” The abstract follows.
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