Federal District-Court Cases

• Statistical Inquiry Form for Completed trials
  limited to cases fully tried.
  
• Statistical Inquiry Form for All cases
  limited to cases from one year at a time, from fiscal 1987 onward.

  This database includes approximately 5 million federal district-court civil cases terminated over the last 22 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. This database is available to performing certain statistical analyses.

  When 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.
  

Federal District-Court Criminal Cases

• coming someday (in the meantime, see the National Criminal Justice Reference Service's Criminal Justice Statistics.)

Federal Bankruptcy Cases

• Large Bankruptcy Reorganization Cases (Chapter 11) Statistical Inquiry
• This page uses data from an abbreviated version of Lynn M. LoPucki's Bankruptcy Research Database. It contains data on all cases filed in the Bankruptcy Courts of the United States from January 1, 1980 through December 31, 1997, in which the debtor was a publicly held company and had more than $100 million in assets, measured in 1980 dollars. Each of the terms employed on this page were carefully defined in the data collection process so that data would be comparable from one case to another.

Federal Appellate Cases

• coming soon