Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:18:48 -0600

From: Russell Brown

Subject: Long Judgments

Posted on behalf of Moin Yahya:

There may be several reasons for the shorter US decisions - here are a few:

1. Tort cases are almost exclusively the province of the state courts. Cases in federal court (including the US Supreme Court) are either federal statutory torts (e.g. Federal Tort Claims Act relating to suits against the US goverment), or applying state law (in cases of diversity, i.e. suits between citizens of two states). In the diversity cases, the federal courts apply state law. State appellate courts tend to be clogged with cases from criminal, family, administrative [ash and trash cases] to the more sophisticated tort cases [although some states have specialized criminal appellate courts, and those tend to have better written civil judgments, e.g. Texas].

2. State Supreme Court justices are not vying for a national platform or recognition. They are at best concerned with the local bar. Hence, writing long decisions to signal their dedication to justice is not as big a deal.

3. Many state justices are elected or at least have to be retained by the voters. Too much writing means too much rope for recall efforts. So more is done with less.

4. The real reason at the end of the day is probably the large volume of cases. In fact, most federal appellate court judgments are issued using one or two page unpublished decisions. While state supreme courts don't generally issue unpublished decisions, their dockets are clogged too, and so the need for quick decisions is paramount.

>>> "Wright, Richard" 7/26/2006 2:02 PM >>>

Based on the few decisions that I have read, it seems to me that a primary factor is the much greater confusion over duty (with shifting, multi-part, overlapping tests) and causation (the latter being longstanding but only recently of great significance) in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth cases, and also to the related great expansions and subsequent contractions of duties and liabilities of (1) governmental defendants and (2) with respect to pure economic loss -- two roads the US courts with rare exception have not travelled.

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