This week, we’re launching a series of six-part posts reviewing the tenure of each of the current Justices of the Supreme Court.  We’ll be posting in order of length of service (although the Chief Justice is technically the senior Justice, we’ll be proceeding by the date of each Justice’s appointment).  We begin with Justice Rita Garman, who took her seat on February 1, 2001.

From that time to date, Justice Garman has participated in 786 civil cases.  Her busiest year was 2004, when she was on 52 civil cases.  The numbers remained in the forties and low fifties every year until 2009, when the Court’s civil docket began to slip.  In 2014, there were only 27 civil cases.  In 2016, it was 28, and it fell further in 2017 (26) and 2018 (22).  In 2019, there were 34 civil cases.  In 2020, there were 32.  So far in 2021, there have been 26 civil cases.

Justice Garman has participated in 874 cases so far that fall under the heading of criminal, quasi-criminal, juvenile justice and mental health.  Her busiest years in that category were 2002 (69 cases), 2003 (64) and 2004 (60).  The numbers were generally in the fifties for several years after that until 2010 (55).  Since that time, the criminal docket has drifted down – 2012 (33 cases), 2013 (38), 2014 (34), 2015 (33), 2016 (35), 2017 (34), 2018 (26), 2019 (21) and 2020 (28).  So far in 2021, there have been 19 cases.

Join us back here next time as we continue our review of the data on Justice Garman.

Image courtesy of Flickr by debaird (no changes).