“Federal District Judge Billy Roy Wilson of the Eastern District of Arkansas closed 3,008 civil cases in the twelve-month period ending June 30, more than any other judge in the nation. Meanwhile, Judge James “Rodney” Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas closed the most cases when the court’s case-weighting system, which seeks to account for the varying complexity of different types of cases, is applied. Those are just two of the findings in a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC researchers have been mining the research center’s newest data tool in search of judges with exceptionally high caseloads. The new TRAC report out today also examines which judges have the most pending cases (one has more than 60,000 cases) for major categories of lawsuit such as civil rights, product liability and property rights. The report’s data comes from TRAC’s Civil Judge caseload tool, a part of its Judge Information Center. The tool provides comprehensive caseload information for all active and senior district court judges who have handled more than 50 cases in the past year — 950 in all. Reporters, researchers and citizens can all use the tool to examine the caseload of any judge of interest. The full report is available at: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/judge/368/
TRAC’s Judge Information Center and its data tools on criminal sentencing, civil caseloads, and immigration asylum denials are at: http://tracfed.syr.edu/judges/interp/“