In section 302 of the Judicial Improvements Act of 1990, Congress took steps to address long-felt concerns about the capacity of the federal judicial system to provide, within a reasonable time, a uniform construction of federal law where uniformity is needed. Adopting a recommendation of the Federal Courts Study Committee, Congress asked that the Federal Judicial Center undertake a study to determine "the number and frequency of conflicts among the judicial circuits . . . that remain unresolved because they are not heard by the Supreme Court." The Center asked the author to design and conduct the study. The results of the first phase of the research are presented in this report.

Despite the various adages concerning statistics and lies, statistics don't lie. Instead, we often mislead ourselves by misinterpreting statistics. Court caseload statistics present numerous opportunities for this sort of self-deception. Obvious ways of looking at caseload data and obvious nostrums about assessing a court's caseload are sometimes just simply wrong. Their flaws are unappreciated not because they are hard to grasp, but because we are conditioned to think about statistics using apples-and-oranges or dicethrowing examples. Because significant time elapses over the life of many court cases, the better statistical analogy is that of human populations. Failure to appreciate how the lifespans of cases affect caseload statistics causes numerous misunderstandings. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate three closely related misunderstandings about caseload statistics, in the hope that a basic understanding of the problem can help prevent mistakes on the part of the various parties charged under the Civil Justice Reform Act with trying to improve the condition of court dockets.

At the request of the Judicial Conference Committee on the Administration of the Bankruptcy System, during fiscal year 1989, the Center surveyed the caseloads of 272 bankruptcy judges (97% of those sitting at the time). The data collected in the survey formed the basis of seventeen case weights, which are the average amounts of time bankruptcy judges spent on the matters that came before them. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts uses the case weights to calculate weighted caseloads for each bankruptcy court, and the Judicial Conference uses this information as a major factor in assessing the need for bankruptcy judgeships.

Reprinted from 65 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 491 (1991).

Report on an empirical study of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. The Research Division of the FJC undertook the study to assist the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules in its evaluation of the rule. The study has three major components: (1) a survey of all federal district judges about their experiences with Rule 11; (2) an analysis of all district and appellate opinions published between 1984 and 1989 that address Rules 11 issues; and (3) a study of Rule 11 activity in five district courts. The district court study includes a separate analysis of the application of Rule 11 to civil rights cases in these five courts.