The Ontario Court of Appeal and Speedy Justice

Authors

Carl Baar
Ian Greene
Martin Thomas
Peter McCormick

Keywords

Ontario. Court of Appeal; Appellate procedure--Statistics; Ontario

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The authors use a data sample collected from the Ontario Court of Appeal minute books between 1983 and 1987 to analyze how appeals move through the province's highest court. Criminal and, chiefly, sentence appeals dominate the Court's agenda. Hearing times-the duration of argument and rendering of judgment-are shorter than commonly believed, most often lasting less than twenty minutes. Elapsed times-the period between end of trial and beginning of hearing-are, on average, 77 per cent longer for civil than criminal appeals, 52 per cent longer for defendant than crown appeals, and 23 per cent longer for fall than spring appeals. Elapsed times are also compared with data on United States appeal courts, and the use of appellate case-flow management is considered.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Citation Information

Baar, Carl; Greene, Ian; Thomas, Martin; and McCormick, Peter. "The Ontario Court of Appeal and Speedy Justice." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 30.2 (1992) : 261-290.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.1723
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol30/iss2/1