Civil Justice Survey of State Courts, 2001 (ICPSR 3957)

Principal Investigator(s): United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics

Summary: This data collection examined general civil cases (torts, contracts, and real property) disposed of by bench or jury trial in the nation's 75 most populous counties in 2001. Information reported includes the type of case, types of plaintiffs and defendants, trial winners, amount of total damages awarded, amount of punitive damages awarded, and case processing time. This is the third in a series of data collections begun in 1992: CIVIL JUSTICE SURVEY OF STATE COURTS, 1992 (ICPSR 6587), and ... (more info)

Series: Civil Justice Survey of State Courts: [United States] Series

• One or more files in this study are not available for download due to special restrictions; consult the restrictions note to learn more. Additional information can also be found in the Use Agreement.

  The data are restricted from general dissemination. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement form and specify the reasons for the request. A copy of the Restricted Data Use Agreement form can be requested by calling 800-999-0960. Researchers can also download this form as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file from the download page associated with this dataset. Completed forms should be returned to: Director, National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Institute for Social Research, P.O. Box 1248, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248, or by fax: 734-647-8200.

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Civil Justice Survey of State Courts, 2001. ICPSR03957-v3. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2011-11-03. doi:10.3886/ICPSR03957.v3

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03957.v3

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Summary:   This data collection examined general civil cases (torts, contracts, and real property) disposed of by bench or jury trial in the nation's 75 most populous counties in 2001. Information reported includes the type of case, types of plaintiffs and defendants, trial winners, amount of total damages awarded, amount of punitive damages awarded, and case processing time. This is the third in a series of data collections begun in 1992: CIVIL JUSTICE SURVEY OF STATE COURTS, 1992 (ICPSR 6587), and CIVIL JUSTICE SURVEY OF STATE COURTS, 1996 (ICPSR 2883).

Subject Terms:   case processing, civil courts, civil law, court cases, court system, disposition (legal), lawsuits, state courts

Geographic Coverage:   United States

Time Period:  

• 2001

Date of Collection:  

• 2002

Universe:   Tort, contract, and real property cases in the 75 most populous counties in the United States.

Data Types:   event/transaction data

Data Collection Notes:

Replicate Weights: The data set contains 100 replicate weight variables (REPWT1 to REPWT100) appropriate for calculating sampling errors using the Wesvar PC variance estimation program, plus two variables, VARSTRAT and VARUNIT, that were developed as part of the processing for creating the replicate weights. The replicate weights were created by the jackknife method and the user must specify the JKN variance estimation procedure when using Wesvar PC. Note on the JKN and FPC factors required for JKN variance estimation: In order for the JKN procedure to work correctly, it is necessary to attach two files of factors to the Wesvar file. These are the FPC and JKN factors. Both files are included under this study, named da3957.p2 and da3957.p3. Users should download both files, change the file name of da3957.p2 to fpc.txt and da3957.p3 to jknfact.dat, and attach both files to the Wesvar data file. In addition, the degrees of freedom should be set at 81 in Wesvar (100 replicate weights -- 19 varstrat units) in order to calculate the correct confidence intervals.

Sample:   A two-stage stratified sample was drawn, with 46 of the 75 most populous counties selected at the first stage. The top 75 counties account for about 37 percent of the United States population and about half of all civil filings. The sample consisted of tort, contract, and real property rights cases disposed by trial between January and December 2001. For each sampled case, a standard coding form was manually completed by court staff on-site to record information about litigants, case type, processing time, and award amounts.

Data Source:

standard coding forms completed by court staff

Original ICPSR Release:  2004-05-28

Version History:

• 2011-11-03 All parts are being moved to restricted access and will be available only using the restricted access procedures.
• 2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to reflect these additions.
• 2004-06-17 The formats for variables COMFILYR, ANSYR, JURSELYR, TRIYR, DELBEGYR, VERDYR, PLNOTYR, and DFNOTYR were changed to F4.0 so that their values would be 4-digit years. Corresponding changes were made to the SAS and SPSS data definition statements and the codebook.

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