Supreme Court of Canada Stats 2005

This is a follow-up to the March 9, 2006 posting Supreme Court of Canada Stats 1995-2005.

The March 24, 2006 issue of The Lawyer's Weekly crunched some of the numbers in its front page article "SCC Unanimous 73% of the time" by Cristin Schmitz and came up with some results for the year 2005:

• B.C. and Quebec supplied most of the workload in 2005
• it took an average total of 18 months from the time of application for leave to apeal to the rendering of the final judgment (a month longer than for 2004)
• the judges added approximately 2,800 pages to the official Supreme Court Reports in 2005
• the judges were unanimous in 73% of cases heard - pretty steady for the past decade
• mostly civil cases were heard (59% were non-criminal) ; the breakdown: non-Charter criminal 35%, commercial 8%, Charter criminal 7%, labour 7%, administrative 4%, constitutional 5%, statutes 5%, immigration 4%, native 4%, procedural law 4%, "other" 16%

Lang Michener's Eugene Meehan is described in the article as explaining that the Court seems to be placing a growing emphasis on civil cases and "hopefully will continue to do so. The foundational cases of the Charter and criminal law are pretty much in place... but the court's statistics... indicate that increasingly the court is open for more general business".