Each year, state courts handle approximately 66 million cases, ranging from serious criminal felonies to minor traffic citations. The Pew Charitable Trusts have put together an interactive chart showing the breakdown of case types, based on data from the National Center for State Courts. It’s worth a look.
Tag: National Center for State Courts
State courts explore using AI for behind-the-scenes HR work
Most news about the use of AI in the legal world tends to focus on ethical slipups like relying on ChatGPT to draft briefs or do legal research. But behind the headlines, courts and law firms are becoming incresingly proficient with using generative AI to perform routine administrative and bureaucratic tasks. A good example is the use of AI to streamline human resources work for the courts. In a recent webinar hosted by the National Center for State Courts and Thompson Reuters, participants pointed out that among other things, HR managers can employ AI to more quickly craft job descriptions and performance reviews.
Of course, AI is still a new and somewhat unpredictable technology, and there are real concerns about hallucination, infringement of intellectual property, and exposure of confidential information. But the technology is rapidly improving and meaningful protocols will be in place soon enough. Court and law firm administrators would do well to see AI as another potentially time-saving tool in the tool kit, no different from word processing software or copy machines in earlier generations.
NCSC creates innovation lab to introduce new technology to courts
This is a very cool development. The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) has created an innovation lab that allows court leaders to observe and test the latest court technology. The lab grew of a recognition that courthouse space needs to be used more creatively in order to provide meaningful access to users.
The lab’s focus extends beyond the courtroom, with prototype “community access points” for public users who will be accessing court services from another location, as well as advanced conference rooms and huddle spaces.
Kudos to the NCSC for embracing the challenges of innovation. I’ll look forward to seeing how these technologies are incorporated by the courts in the coming years.
New NCSC study finds increased public trust in state courts
The National Center for State Courts’ 2024 survey on the State of State Courts shows increased public trust in state court systems. This year, 63% of survey respondents expressed trust in their state courts, the second year in a row in which the number has climbed. In addition, 54% gave their courts a positive job approval rating, up from 44% just three years ago.
This is indeed a positive trend, especially with so much political effort on the federal level being devoted to artificially depressing the courts’ legitimacy. It’s a signal that Americans can distinguish between political posturing and the important work that their state and local courts do every day.
There is more work to be done. Distressingly — but perhaps unsurprisingly — only one in four respondents believes that state courts are doing enough to help self-represented litigants navigate the court system. But overall, the trends are in the right direction, and a sign that state courts generally have earned the confidence of their communities.
Senate passes bill to improve security for state judges
The Senate has unanimously passed the Countering Threats and Attacks on Our Judges Act, a bipartisan bill to provide additional security measures for state judges. The bill would establish a State Judicial Threat Intelligence and Resource Center, to be housed within the State Judicial Institute, which would provide technical assistance, training, and threat monitoring for state and local judges and court personnel.
The bill is supported by many key players, including the National Center for State Courts, the Conference of Chief Justices, the American Judges Association, and the National Association for Court Management. The bill now moves to the House for further consideration.
State courts confront budget shortfalls in wake of COVID
It should come as no surprise that state court systems, like state governments generally, are struggling to adapt to the financial pressures imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. For courts, COVID has meant the closing of courthouses, delays in trials and pre-trial hearings, rapid investment in technology infrastructure, mounting case blacklogs, and a surge in filings — particularly in those areas of the law most affected by economic dopwnturns (like contracts and consumer credit).
Now, as the calendar year turns over, state court administrators are preparing budgets for 2021, and the needs are staggering. And in many states, the extra money is simply not there. Indeed, as this Law360 story explains, a number of state courts expect that a relatively mild budget cut might be the best case scenario.
There are no easy answers. But we might learn from those state court systems that have developed (and are now able to draw upon) extensive rainy day funds, as well as using the current situation as an opportunity to reassess the most important priorities for the court systems and the communities they serve.
Election 2020: a quick state court roundup
Even with all eyes trained on the Presidential election, voters in more than thirty states also cast ballots this week for (or against) state judges. Here are some of the preliminary stories coming out of Election Day:
In both Dallas County and Harris County, Texas, Democrats swept the contested judicial races, making it yet another election cycle in which a single party has taken control of the state judiciary in Texas’s two largest metro areas. In North Carolina, a party sweep of another type took place, with Republican judicial candidates winning each of their judicial races. Neither case should be seen as good news. Party sweeps strip the courts of critical judicial experience, replacing it only with a partisan fetish that a judge with an (R) or a (D) next to his name will rule in a certain way. If the judges are fair, the partisans are more often than not disappointed by some case outcomes. And if the judges give the partisans what they want every time, the integrity of the judiciary is compromised. (Just a thought: perhaps it is finally time to eliminate partisan judicial elections altogether.)
In Illinois, for the first time, a sitting supreme court justice lost his retention bid. A little less than 57% of voters chose to retain Justice Thomas Kilbride, but under the state’s unique rules, at least 60% of voters needed to favor retention for Kilbride to keep his seat. Thus we have the unusual circumstance in which a judge whom most voters wanted to retain nevertheless will have to leave the bench. (The unusual nature of Illinois’s judicial retention system has an equally unusual history, which I might try to unpack in a future blog post.)
In Tampa, Florida, a state trial judge who lost his primary race in August pushed the state supreme court not to certify this week’s judicial election results. The judge is arguing that the current state law allows judicial races to be settled in the primaries, whereas the state constitution requires that they be decided during the November general election.
And in Arizona (where ballots are still being counted as of this writing), the Maricopa County Democratic Party campaigned against the retention of two state trial judges, including the only Native American judge on the Maricopa County Superior Court. Both targeted judges were deemed by the state’s independent Commission on Judicial Performance Review to have met performance standards. Unlike Illinois, a simple majority in favor of retention is enough to keep the judges on the bench.
The latest on state appellate arguments by videoconference
This Law.com article has a nice summary of where state appellate courts stand on videoconferencing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It focuses on courts in Georgia, but usefully points out where other states are in the process as well.
Helping courts prepare for public health emergencies
As the world nervously watches the spread of the coronavirus from its origins in China, court systems should be updating or preparing their own pandemic response plans. The National Center for State Courts has an excellent compilation of useful materials here.
National Judicial Opioid Task Force releases final report
In 2017, the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators created the National Judicial Opioid Task Force to address the role of state courts in combating problems associated with opioid addiction. The Task Force has recently released its final report, which can be found here.
The four key findings of the Task Force are:
- There is a lack of access to and education about the use of quality, evidence-based treatment, including medication-based treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD)
- The most significant impact of the epidemic involves cases with children and families
- Congress and federal agencies must recognize state courts as essential partners in the response to the opioid crisis
- State courts must design programs and resources that will be effective responses to the next addiction crisis–not just opioids
I encourage you to read the whole thing for further context, and for recommendations on how state courts can respond to the crisis.
The Interdependent Third Branch 