No Divisions In Latest Illinois Supreme Court Rulings
From the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin
From high school bleachers to the Brookfield Zoo, from driver’s licenses to juvenile court jurisdiction, the latest decisions from the state’s top court covered a diverse range of topics.
But the Illinois Supreme Court opinions issued last week had at least one thing in common: None of the justices disagreed with them.
Out of the 12 decisions released Thursday, none of them contained dissenting or additional concurring opinions and none of the justices abstained from voting.
In civil cases at least, the latest batch of rulings pushed the high court’s rate of unanimous decisions this year to about 86 percent, according to Kirk C. Jenkins, a partner at Sedgwick LLP and longtime high court watcher.
If that rate stays constant the rest of the year, it would be the highest rate of unanimity in his data set, a compilation dating back to 2000. The rate of unanimous decisions that year was the lowest in that time frame, at 57.9 percent. The highest rate he’s observed happened twice, in 2007 and 2009, when 80.5 percent of the court’s decisions were unanimous.
But Jenkins, who writes about his findings on his blog, Illinois Supreme Court Review, doesn’t expect the unanimity rate to remain that high.
Read more in our daily News Update...
From the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin
From high school bleachers to the Brookfield Zoo, from driver’s licenses to juvenile court jurisdiction, the latest decisions from the state’s top court covered a diverse range of topics.
But the Illinois Supreme Court opinions issued last week had at least one thing in common: None of the justices disagreed with them.
Out of the 12 decisions released Thursday, none of them contained dissenting or additional concurring opinions and none of the justices abstained from voting.
In civil cases at least, the latest batch of rulings pushed the high court’s rate of unanimous decisions this year to about 86 percent, according to Kirk C. Jenkins, a partner at Sedgwick LLP and longtime high court watcher.
If that rate stays constant the rest of the year, it would be the highest rate of unanimity in his data set, a compilation dating back to 2000. The rate of unanimous decisions that year was the lowest in that time frame, at 57.9 percent. The highest rate he’s observed happened twice, in 2007 and 2009, when 80.5 percent of the court’s decisions were unanimous.
But Jenkins, who writes about his findings on his blog, Illinois Supreme Court Review, doesn’t expect the unanimity rate to remain that high.
Read more in our daily News Update...