Have you ever wondered how long it will take for your appeal to be decided? I’m sure you have. This is a longstanding question that has no answer. The opinion-writing process is a black box, so it’s anyone’s guess how long it will take.
But, does that mean there’s really no answer at all? I was dissatisfied by that defeatist sentiment, so I decided to see if I could conjure up some answer to the question. To do so, I decided to compile the last two years of Oregon Supreme Court opinions and figure out the average time it takes from submission to opinion. In total, I analyzed 92 opinions with a publication date of February 10, 2022 to February 1, 2024.
So, what’s the answer?
If you don’t plan to read more than three paragraphs of this post, here’s the information you’re looking for. The average (mean) time it takes from submission to opinion at the Oregon Supreme Court is 220 days—i.e., roughly seven months.
What if we remove the outliers?
There are a few opinions that took far more time or far less time than most cases. If we remove the opinions that took more than 400 days to publish, and those that took less than 50 days, the average changes to 217 days. In other words, there’s basically no change.
Similarly, if we use the median instead of the mean, that reduces the average time to 212 days. A bit more of a drop, but not much of a change.
Do concurrences and dissents add much time?
No, not really. If we remove opinions with at least one concurrence or dissent from the sample, the average time to publication drops to 205 days. That’s only a two week difference when a concurrence or dissent is involved. This surprised me. When I started gathering the data, I assumed dissents and concurrences would add a significant chunk of time. In reality, though, you can only expect about two extra weeks.
Does the type of case affect the length?
While I was putting together these numbers, I made sure to categorize each type of case to hopefully shed some more light on the numbers. Unfortunately, there was enough of a range of cases that I don’t have a large enough sample size of any one type of case. So, I don’t feel confident making any assessments regarding this variable.
That said, I plan to keep adding to my list, so hopefully it will reach a point where we have some statistically sound sample sizes here.
Are there any trends over the past two years?
Two years isn’t a large sample size, but I was curious whether there was any noticeable trend (upward or downward) over the past two years. Unsurprisingly, there is none. I created a graph to illustrate this, but unfortunately I can’t paste it in Substack. If I get more interesting results in the future, I’ll find a way to provide a visualization of the data.
Conclusion
If someone asks you how long it will take their case to be decided at the Oregon Supreme Court, your best bet is to tell them “around 7 to 8 months.” In the future, I may be able to provide more precise estimates based on the type of case. But for now, it seems like 200 to 220 days is the safe guess.