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Remember that scene in the movie "A Few Good Men" when Lt. Daniel Kaffe strolls into the majestic courtroom and says with self amazement "So this is what a courtroom looks like." It's a sad but true announcement of the state of affairs in the adjudication of legal cases today. Scholars have endeavored to divine the reason behind the decline of trials, but a voice from Wisconsin may have hit the nail on the head with astonishing clarity. In the past several decades class actions, technology, regulation and legislation have made the fact questions quite apparently answerable, thus the need for answers on the law are all that are necessary to resolve many disputes. As a result, we've seen the decline of jury trials in America. Taking University of Wisconsin Law School Prof. Marc Galanter's essay on the "Vanishing Trial" at face value, most practitioners agree there are fewer trials, more law practiced in the shadows and a growing segment of inexperienced litigators and judges. Galanter not long ago unveiled a comprehensive study in which he chronicled a sharp decline in tried cases in this country. He found at the federal level, civil dispositions rocketed by a factor of five between 1962-2003 to 252,000 cases, but trials dropped by 27 percent during that time frame. There were peaks and valleys within that time span - trials hit a high in 1985 when 12,529 trials took place, but in the ensuing years trials dropped by almost two-thirds so that only 1.7 percent of cases are resolved at trial, down from 4.7 percent.
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