Just 677 Jurists Oversee More than 700,000 Cases a Year; Congress Offers a Band-Aid
The number of federal court cases is rising fast, but because the number of federal judges is lagging, a huge backlog is developing.
By last June 30, the number of federal cases, both civil and criminal, ballooned to more than 715,000.
That is up from nearly 600,000 for the same period in 2020 and a jump of 36% from 2016, according to a report issued by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Meanwhile, the number of federal district judgeships remains at 677.
Congress could authorize more judges, but increasing federal spending is one of the most contentious issues on Capitol Hill.
Judge Margaret C. Rodgers of the Northern District of Florida had roughly 286,000 civil actions pending last year.
While every judge appears buried in caseloads, there are glaring disparities in the caseloads of specific judges.
For federal judges who handle multi-district litigation, MDLs, pending civil case action is skyrocketing. District Court Judge Margaret C. Rodgers of the Northern District of Florida had roughly 286,000 civil actions pending last year, according to the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation.
MDLs are complex cases that involve plaintiffs from different federal judicial districts but involve common issues. These cases are typically assigned to a specific judge for pretrial litigation.
The idea is that bringing many similar cases before one judge reduces duplicative discovery, saving resources while protecting against inconsistent pretrial rulings by different judges.
Most of these cases involve personal injury or product liability.
For example, Rodgers’ astronomical amount of legal actions relate to just two MDLs:
One is the Abilify (Aripiprazole) Products Liability Litigation in which plaintiffs allege the drug turned them into gambling and sex addicts, out of control shoppers and voracious eaters.
The other concerns the 3M Combat Arms Earplug Products Liability Litigation.
Rodgers carries eight times the caseload compared with the next judge on the list, Freda L. Wolfson of New Jersey. Wolfson had 38,000 pending actions at the end of 2021.
ACTION BOX/ What You Can Do About It
Contact your representatives and senators to request action on the bill to add more federal district judges.
Among non-MDL judges, Judge Miranda Mai Du of the Federal District Court for Nevada has the largest caseload in the country. She has 388 prisoner petitions pending, according to a report by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, TRAC. The clearinghouse collects raw government data and makes sense of it for citizens.
Caseloads between MDL and non-MDL judges can get confusing because the numbers do not always translate into a larger workload. That is a more specific issue.
The federal court system typically relies on a random assignment process for individual district judges. However, for civil cases, there could be particular reasons a specific judge is assigned a case, according to TRAC.
If our legal system is to cut through the backlog, we need more judges. But the only hope on the horizon is at least three years away. A bill introduced to the Senate at the end of July 2021 proposed adding 77 district judgeships.
But even if this bill becomes law, the first judge would not be seated until 2025. The bill would spread half of the new judgeships among 13 states in 2025. The other half of new judgeships would be created by the end of 2029 in 10 of those 13 states.
In other words, despite a crushing burden of cases and no reason to believe the flood of new cases will slow, Congress considers the quantitative level of federal justice to be unimportant. And that means the quality of justice must suffer through delay, judicial excuses to dismiss cases to relieve the burden or inadequate attention to each case.