State Civil Trials

State Court Civil Jury Trials

This page utilizes a sampling that comprises about 6.5 thousand state tort, contract, and real property cases terminated during fiscal 1992 by means of a jury trial in the general jurisdiction trial court of 45 of the nation's most populous counties. The data were gathered and assembled by the National Center for State Courts and disseminated by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

The data include the subject matter category (branches of tort, contract, and real property), the type of parties, the dates of filing and termination in the trial court, the procedural method of disposition, and who prevailed in what amount. (To get further information that should help in defining the critical terms, you can click on the highlighted terms or go to the 920KB ICPSR state codebook readable with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Also, the appendices to that codebook include three articles, produced by the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics, that use and explain this database.)

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.

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

terminated from July 1,1991, to June 30, 1992, in the county or counties of .

I want to focus on cases with the primary plaintiff being and the primary defendant being .

I am interested in cases that terminated by the disposition method or device of .

Notes on Specifying the Data Set:

On some browsers, e.g., Netscape for UNIX, you must click on the default choice to turn it off. On other browsers, clicking on any other choice will turn off the default. You can tell what you have selected by looking at which selections are highlighted.
Where multiple selections for a particular variable make sense, you may select more than one from the scrollable list by disengaging the default choice and then holding the control-key or Apple-key down while clicking on your selections.
If "all" or some other general grouping has been chosen together with any included subset of the selection variable--e.g., all counties and Pima County have been chosen--only the output for the grouping is generated. If you want output for a subset, do not select the more general grouping.
For the case categories and for the counties, we have shown the NCSC's code number as well as the name. The output will use only the code number. So, note the codes for the categories and counties that interest you, or download a list of names and numbers after clicking here.

Second, given the selected data set, I would like to know:
FREQUENCY:

the number of such cases in the sample.

DURATION:

the time on the docket, being the mean, median, and standard deviation of the time from filing to termination for such cases that show the time.

JUDGMENTS:

the number of such cases that went to verdict (either for plaintiff or for defendant but not for both or for party unknown)--and the win rate or percentage of plaintiff wins among such verdicts.

AMOUNTS AWARDED TO PLAINTIFFS:

the mean, median, and standard deviation of the amounts awarded (including punitive damages), in then current dollars, in those cases yielding judgments for plaintiffs and showing a positive dollar recovery.
the mean, median, and standard deviation of the amounts of punitive damages awarded, in then current dollars, in those cases yielding judgments for plaintiffs and showing a positive dollar punitive damage award.

AMOUNTS AWARDED TO DEFENDANTS:

the mean, median, and standard deviation of the amounts awarded (including punitive damages), in then current dollars, in those cases yielding judgments for defendants and showing a positive dollar recovery.
the mean, median, and standard deviation of the amounts of punitive damages awarded, in then current dollars, in those cases yielding judgments for defendants and showing a positive dollar punitive damage award.

BASIS FOR AGGREGATION:

The default output will aggregate results by case category. If you would like cases aggregated on another available basis, select it here: .

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all categories
CONTRACT
20 Fraud/Misrepresentation
21 Seller Suits
22 Buyer Suits
23 Mortgage Foreclosure
24 Employment Actions
25 Rental Actions
29 Other Contract Actions
REAL PROPERTY
31 Condemnation
32 Title Dispute
39 Other Real Property Actions
TORT
1 Motor Vehicle
2 Premises Liability
3 Product Liability
6 Intentional Tort
7 Medical Malpractice
8 Other Malpractice
9 Defamation
10 Toxic Substance
15&19 Other Tort Actions
99 Uncategorized

all counties
1 Maricopa AZ
2 Pima AZ
3 Alameda CA
4 Contra Costa CA
5 Fresno CA
6 Los Angeles CA
7 Orange CA
8 San Bernardino CA
9 San Francisco CA
10 Santa Clara CA
11 Ventura CA
12 Fairfield CT
13 Hartford CT
14 Dade FL
15 Orange FL
16 Palm Beach FL
17 Fulton GA
18 Honolulu HA
19 Cook IL
20 DuPage IL
21 Marion IN
22 Jefferson KY
23 Essex MA
24 Middlesex MA
25 Norfolk MA
26 Suffolk MA
27 Worcester MA
28 Oakland MI
29 Wayne MI
30 Hennepin MN
31 St. Louis MO
32 Bergen NJ
33 Essex NJ
34 Middlesex NJ
35 New York NY
36 Cuyahoga OH
37 Franklin OH
38 Allegheny PA
39 Philadelphia PA
40 Bexar TX
41 Dallas TX
42 Harris TX
43 Fairfax VA
44 King WA
45 Milwaukee WI