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Who Wins and Who Loses in the Provincial Courts of Appeal? A Statistical Analysis, 1920–1990*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Peter McCormick
Peter McCormick
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Lethbridge
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Abstract

Given the visibility and obvious importance of judicial power in the age of the Charter, it is important to develop the conceptual vocabulary for desribing and assessing this power. One such concept that has been applied to the study of appeal courts in the United States and Great Britain is “party capability”, a theory which suggests that different types of litigant will enjoy different levels of success as both appellant and respondent. Using a data base derived from the reported decisions of the provincial courts of appeal for the second and seventh year of each decade since the 1920s, this article applies party capability theory to the performance of the highest courts of the ten provinces; comparisons are attempted across regions and across time periods, as well as with the findings of similar studies of American and British courts.

Résumé

Étant donné la visibilité et l'indiscutable importance du pouvoir judiciaire à l'ère de la Charte, il est essentiel de développer le vocabulaire conceptuel nécessaire à sa description et à son évaluation. L'un des concepts ainsi utilisés aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne dans l'étude du pouvoir exercé par les tribunaux d'appel est celui de l'“aptitude des parties”, une théorie selon laquelle différents types de plaideurs obtiendront plus ou moins de succès, et ce tant à titre d'appelants qu'à titre d'intimés. À partir d'une banque de données regroupant les décisions rapportées rendues par les cours d'appel provinciales au cours de la deuxième et de la septième année de chaque décennie depuis les années 1920, cet article applique la théorie de l'aptitude des parties à la performance des plus hautes cours des dix provinces canadiennes. L'auteur y effectue d'abord certaines comparaisons entre les diverses régions et périodes, puis confronte les résultats obtenus à ceux d'études similaires effectuées auprès des tribunaux américains et britanniques.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall/automne 1994 , pp. 21 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1994

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References

1. Or possibly on the “case congregation” including a related series of cases that will be caught by the same line of precedents. See, e.g., Galanter, M., “Case Congregations and Their Careers” (1990) 24 Law and Society Review 371CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Gibson, D., “The Crumbling Pyramid: Constitutional Appeal Rights in Canada” (1989) 38 University of New Brunswick Law Journal 1Google Scholar.

3. The term is taken from Atkins, B. M., “Party Capability Theory as an Explanation for Intervention Behaviour in the English Court of Appeal” (1991) 35 American Journal of Political Science 881CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An anonymous assessor rightly objected to the logical error of taking as a label for the phenomenon what is really only one possible explanation for it; my use of the term is intended to locate this piece in relation to other contemporary research, not to beg the question of what might cause the phenomenon.

4. Galanter, M., “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Social Change” (1974) 9 Law and Society Review 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Galanter, M., “Afterword: Explaining Litigation” (1974) 9 Law and Society Review 347CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. See, e.g., Wheeler, S. et al. , “Do the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead? Winning and Losing in State Supreme Courts, 1870–1970” (1987) 21 Law and Society Review 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Songer, D. & Sheehan, R., “Who Wins on Appeal? Upperdogs and Underdogs in the United States Courts of Appeals” (1992) 36 American Journal of Political Science 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an application of party capability theory to the Canadian context, see McCormick, P., “Party Capability Theory and Appellate Success in the Supreme Court of Canada” (1993) 26 Canadian Journal of Political Science [forthcoming] 528CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Galanter, “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead”, supra note 4.

7. Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5.

8. Sheehan, R. S., “Governmental Litigants, Underdogs and Civil Liberties: A Reassessment of a Trend in Supreme Court Decisionmaking” (1992) 45 Western Political Quarterly 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Wheeler et al., supra note 5.

10. See Sheehan, R. S., Mishler, W. & Songer, D. R., “Ideology, Status and the Differential Success of Direct Parties Before the Supreme Court” (1992) 86 American Political Science Review 464CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Different considerations, of course, apply at the original trial level.

12. The reports that were checked for these decisions were: Alberta Reports, Alberta Law Reports, Atlantic Provinces Reports, British Columbia Law Reports, Canadian Bankruptcy Reports, Canadian Cases in the Law of Insurance, Canadian Cases in the Law of Torts, Canadian Criminal Cases, Canadian Rights Reporter, Criminal Reports, Dominion Law Reports, Manitoba Reports, Maritime Provinces Reports, Ontario Appeal Cases, Ontario Law Reports, Ontario Reports, Ontario Weekly Notes, Ontario Weekly Reporter, Recueils de jurisprudence du Québec, Reports on Family Law, Saskatchewan Reports, and Western Weekly Reports.

13. 1967 for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1975 for Newfoundland, 1987 for Prince Edward Island.

14. Wheeler et al., supra note 5.

15. As an Alberta appeal judge said of the recession that followed the Western resource boom: “During the boom, they fought over the profits; now, they fight over the liabilities.”

16. From the citation study which generated the data base on which this paper is based: citations to unreported decisions constitute less than 1% of all citations to judicial authorities.

17. The author has complete data on reported and unreported cases for only a single province—Manitoba—and only for a recent two-year span—1990 and 1991.

With all due caution for the limited and not-necessarily representative sample, it does not appear that the substitution of reported for all cases necessarily creates a fatal distortion in the overall patterns.

18. The information that is available suggests that reversal rates in the provincial courts of appeal are in the 35-40% range. See, e.g., British Columbia Court of Appeal Annual Report 1990 at 26 and 28; McCormick, P., “Caseload and Output of the Manitoba Court of Appeal 1990” (1992) 21 Manitoba Law Review 24Google Scholar; McCormick, P., “Conviction Appeals to the Court of Appeal of Alberta” (1993) 31 Alberta Law Review 301Google Scholar.

19. See, e.g., Atkins, B. M., “Communication of Appellate Decisions: A Multivariate Model for Understanding the Selection of Cases for Publication” (1990) 24 Law and Society Review 1171CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Atkins, B. M., “Data Collection in Comparative Judicial Research: A Note on the Effects of Case Publication Upon Theory Building and Hypothesis Testing” (1992) 45 Western Political Quarterly 783CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both articles are directed not to the selective publication practices of some U.S. courts (which enjoy direct control over which decisions are published) but to the English Court of Appeal (which has no such control), and they are therefore directly relevant to the Canadian situation.

20. Until recently, an appeal against a decision of, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles would sometimes name either the minister or the specific official involved; the legal description of the case, however, makes its official and governmental nature very clear.

21. Wheeler et al., supra note 5 at 413.

22. Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 239.

23. For example, Galanter has argued that the appropriate unit for analysis for many purposes is not the individual case but the “congregation” of cases raising similar issues within a discrete unit of time. Galanter, M., “Case Congregations and their Careers” (1990) 24 Law and Society Review 371CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Not, to be sure, a small matter for a group significantly favoured by some aspect of the legal status quo.

25. See, e.g., Gambitta, R. A. L., “Litigation, Judicial Deference and Policy Change” (1981) 3 Law and Policy Quarterly at 142Google Scholar: “In this article, I argue that lawsuits which lose in court can stimulate positive policy change, and that the final court ruling is not necessarily the most significant or influential event in the litigation process with respect to policy reform.”

26. Wheeler et al., supra note 5 at 408.

27. See, e.g., Glasbeek, H. J., “Contempt for Workers” (1990) 28 Osgoode Hall L.J. at 8Google Scholar: “In the past, courts have sided with capital when it clashed with labour. This well-established fact is central to the argument of those who oppose the Charter as an instrument to achieve a better society.”

28. A different logic, of course, would apply to trial courts, which Galanter suggests are typically used by powerful groups to enforce their rights and advantages. See Galanter, “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead”, supra note 4.

29. The concept and method of calculation are both taken from Wheeler et al., supra note 5 at 407.

30. That is, by definition, individual litigants won one half of the cases in which both appellant and respondent were individuals.

31. Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 241.

32. Omitting the “other” category, on the grounds that the very low numbers and its residual nature prevent meaningful comparisons.

33. See, e.g., McCormick, P. & Griffiths, Justice W. D., “Canadian Provincial Courts of Appeal: A Comparison of Procedure” (Paper presented at the 1993 Canadian Appellate Court Seminar sponsored by the National Judicial Institute, Montréal, April 1993)Google Scholar.

34. From Wheeler et al, supra note 5 at 418.

35. From Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 243.

36. Treated by both as a sub-category of the “business organization” category, rather than as a separate category. This means that the following line (“business organizations”) includes big businesses, and overstates the advantage of other (i.e. “non-big”) business organizations as a separate group.

37. See Wheeler et al., supra note 5 at 422.

38. See Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 244.

39. Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 256.

40. Wheeler et al., supra note 5 at 407, fn. 7.

41. Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 240.

42. Even where leave application is required, the process is not always used as a gatekeeping mechanism; see P. McCormick, “Conviction Appeals”, supra note 18 at 303.

43. Atkins, supra note 3.

44. Songer & Sheehan, supra note 5 at 235.