Federal District-Court Civil Trials

decorative image This page utilizes a database of about 3.7 million federal district-court civil cases terminated over the last 17 fiscal years. The data were gathered by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, assembled by the Federal Judicial Center, and disseminated by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

decorative imageWhen any civil case terminates in federal district court, the court clerk transmits a form to the Administrative Office containing information about the case. The form includes data regarding the subject matter category (such as branches of tort, contract, civil rights, and other areas of law), the jurisdictional basis, the amount demanded, the case's origin in the district as original or removed or transferred, the dates of filing and termination in the district, the procedural stage of the case at termination (including whether it was tried by judge or jury), the procedural method of disposition, and, when a judgment was entered, who prevailed and any amount awarded in damages or other relief. (To get further information that should help in defining the critical terms, you can click on the highlighted terms or go to the 210KB ICPSR civil codebook.)

We have used the database in several articles. This page makes the database available to you for performing certain statistical analyses. So, at this point you take over. First, you specify the set of cases you want to examine. Second, you indicate what operations you want to perform on that data set.

Note that we are assuming that you're using a Netscape-type browser, but we're making efforts to avoid being browser-specific.

For the time being, to keep computer usage under control, you are limited to cases fully tried.


First, let's define the particular data set that interests me. I would like to examine the federal civil cases in the case category or categories of

terminated during the calendar year or years of

in the district or districts of .

I want to focus on cases resting on the jurisdictional basis of

and coming to the district court by way of .

I am interested in .


Notes on Specifying the Data Set:

Second, given the selected data set, I would like to know:
FREQUENCY: DURATION: JUDGMENTS: AMOUNTS DEMANDED: AMOUNTS AWARDED: BASIS FOR AGGREGATION:

Copyright © 1995 by Theodore Eisenberg & Kevin M. Clermont
Comments to te13@cornell.edu
arrowback to beginning of this form
gavelback to main page