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Chapter 12 bankruptcy filing rates from 1986 to 2001 are compared with farm bankruptcy rates from 1898 1979. Data are also presented on Chapter 12 discharge rates. Although Chapter 12 filings are reorganizations and exclude liquidations, Chapter 12 filings per farm in the 1990s exceeded filing rates in earlier decades with comparable economic conditions. Higher proportions of Chapter 12 cases filed in the 1990s failed to receive discharges than Chapter 12 cases filed in the late 1980s. This finding may indicate more debt restructurings are taking place outside of Chapter 12 and that a higher proportion of filings are “hard cases.”

Prior research has argued that management has an advantage in many grievance cases largely because it enjoys the discretion to pursue these cases or otherwise as it chooses. Conversely, organized labor has far less discretion inasmuch as it must pursue serious grievances for which positive outcomes cannot reasonably be expected It was recently demonstrated that grievances “filed in the name of the union” may provide an important exception to this principle. This empirical assessment of arbitration cases (N = 520) extends these arguments from the context of the grievance to that of arbitration, an arguably more valid and generalizable context for such an assessment. The results indicate that “filing in the name of the union” does provide a substantive edge in arbitration outcomes, even while controlling for the various types of arbitration cases.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of research literature on case clearance levels. Through a social artifact framework, the authors seek to understand the role that documentation of key solvability factors in investigative reports plays in shaping case clearance outcomes.

For this study, 166 non-fatal shooting investigative case files were obtained from a local mid-sized urban police department and coded to assess whether investigators identified key solvability characteristics for non-fatal shooting incidents. Using a logistic regression, the authors assessed the extent that investigative characteristics mentioned in case files were associated with the odds that the case was cleared by arrest.

The findings from this study indicate that investigative case files as a data source are exceedingly unreliable. Investigators do not consistently document investigative practices and intelligence. And those that are consistently documented are a part of institutionalized practices that are unique to their corresponding police department.

This study is original in that it uses a social artifact framework to sharpen the focus on the role that the effective documentation of critical evidence plays in leading to arrests in gun violence cases.

Criminal law has dramatically expanded since the 1970s. Despite popular and academic attention to overcriminalization in the United States, empirical research on how court actors and, in particular, prosecutors, use the legal tools associated with overcriminalization is scarce. In this chapter, we describe three forms of overcriminalization that, in theory, have created new tools for prosecutors: the criminalization of new behaviors, mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, and the internal expansion of criminal laws. We then use a unique dataset of felony filings and dispositions in Florida from 1995 to 2015 to test a series of hypotheses examining how overcriminalization influences prosecutorial practices given three changes to the political economy during this time: the decline in violent and property crime, the Great Recession, and a growing call for criminal justice reform. We find that prosecutors have been unconstrained by declining crime rates. Yet, rather than rely on new criminal statutes or mandatory minimum sentence laws, they maintained their caseloads by increasing their filing rates for traditional violent, property and drug offenses. At the same time, the data demonstrate nonviolent other offenses are the top charge in almost 20% of the felony caseload between 2005 and 2015. Our findings also suggest that, despite reform rhetoric, filing and conviction rates decreased due to the Recession, not changes in the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal justice reform.

The filing and indexing of unpublished papers in government departments is a job given in the great majority of departments to a special section known as ‘the registry’, and a description of the practice in government departments reduces to a description of ‘registry procedure’.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by Tony McSean, Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for VINE articles rests with the British Library Board, but opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription to VINE is £10 per year and the subscription period runs from January to December.

The marriage between information and communication technology (ICT) and law has brought forward a significant change in the administration of justice. This paper aims to present the scenario of technology adoption in the court of law with special reference to Malaysia. It also aims to illustrate the intelligent use of technology to advance the pace of the administration of court reflected in w‐Shariah project in Shariah Court systems in Malaysia through various electronic applications, and finally propose an ICT adoption framework based on an information systems (IS) theory.

This research adopts a qualitative case study approach to explore the scenario of information technology (IT) adoption in the court of law in Malaysia through semi‐structured interviews, observation and document reviews. Data gathered provide an understanding of how technology is used in the court workflow as well as the whole life‐cycle management of records in Shariah Court. This case study covers the management of records in Shariah courts of Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya. It involves personal observations on the whole life‐cycle of court room technology management.

Five e‐Shariah modules were applied in 110 Shariah courts in Malaysia in 102 locations nationwide, using the electronic government network called EG*Net. E‐Shariah applications managed to standardize work environment in Shariah courts and link all the business processes on a single channel. Case clearance rate has risen significantly since then.

This research is limited to the electronic applications in Shariah Court system, the secondary legal system in Malaysia after the Civil Court system. It is suggested that the future research is done to the Civil Court system, to complement the current research; in order to have a complete IS perspective on the overall legal system in Malaysia.

This paper proposed a technology adoption framework for electronic court management, which can be used by the policy makers for the enhancement of justice system. This research provides a foundation for practical technology adoption in courts.

This paper demonstrates how ICT allow for better management of court management within institutionalization theory. It presents various kind of technology adoption in courts, including video conferencing with high‐tech video presenters and monitors, recreation of crime scene, electronic filing system, electronic case management and electronic court records management and systematic information storage and retrieval system. It discusses the three isomorphic pressures (coercive, normative and mimetic) that influence the technology adoption process. A research framework is presented which is expected to benefit the policy makers and judicial practitioners.

This chapter provides a theoretical framework of dispute settlement to explain the surge in blocking incidence of GATT panel reports during the 1980s and the variations in withdrawn incidence versus total disputes across different decades of the GATT regime. The study first suggests the role of the degree of legal controversy over a panel ruling in determining countries' incentives to block (appeal) a panel report under the GATT (WTO) regime. The study then analyzes the effects of political power on countries' incentives to use, and their interactions in using, the dispute settlement mechanism, given two-sided asymmetric information regarding panel judgement.

The use of law reports as a source for data on citation patterns in the courts of law has been pioneered in the United States and to some extent in Canada. Very little work has been undertaken within the English legal system until now. The difficulties faced are noted: the complexity of the court structures and the law reporting system, but above all the limitations of using law reports rather than the original case transcripts which are difficult to obtain. A citation file was built from the citations included in all the issues of fifty‐eight different law report titles issued during 1985. Since there is a degree of duplication in coverage of cases between the law report publications, 5,260 versions of 2,451 unique cases were discovered, yielding a file of 25,868 citations (excluding those to statutory materials). The file was reduced to 11,159 citations (excluding those to statutory materials) by selecting only the longest versions, according to the number of words, of each of the 2,451 cases. Analyses are presented on the general characteristics of the citation file (the proportion of citations to each of twenty‐four different material types), the frequency of citation to statutory materials, case law and other materials (each cross‐tabulated by citing court, subject matter of the citing case and, except for statutory materials, whether the citation occurred in argument by counsel only or in the judgement). For case law only further analyses were performed to identify the jurisdiction of cited cases, self citation practice by different courts, the ageing of authority, the law report titles from which cited cases were taken, the use of unreported cases, and the occurrence of cases without citations to earlier case law.