judgeship at Trenton due to the elevation of Chief Judge Phillip Forman to the court of appeals. The district court had only five judgeships at the termination of World War II, at which time the court began to accumulate a very heavy backlog, which by 1946 amounted to over 1,800 cases. At the same time, median time from filing to disposition increased until it reached 20 months in the year 1948. One additional judgeship was created in the omnibus judgeship bill of 1949 and another in the bill of 1954. In the meantime, a determined attack was made on the pending caseload, which was reduced from 1,634 civil cases at the end of the fiscal year 1948 to 880 at the end of the fiscal year 1959. At the same time, the median time from filing to disposition was reduced until for 1959 it stood at 13.7 months, a month and a half less than the national median. The effect of the jurisdiction bill was to reduce the filings in 1959 by about 200 cases, or approximately 15 percent.

The caseload per judge in the fiscal year 1959 was considerably less than the national average, as shown by the following figures:

Judge Smith, who is now chief judge, sat for about 3 months in Brooklyn last spring acting as administrative judge for a group of visiting judges brought In that district to assist in clearing the dockets.

During the first half of fiscal year 1960, 622 civil cases were filed, which was 7 percent less than the year before, but the private civil cases filed increased by 18 percent. However, the number of civil cases terminated decreased considerably due to the fact that for approximately 3 months Judge Forman, although still assigned to the district court, devoted practically all his time to the Salk Vaccine Antitrust case, which was tried in Trenton, and Judge Smith' sat for some further time in Brooklyn. This is typical of some of the big cases handled in this district. Another such case, now before Judge Hartshorne, is the antitrust suit against Procter & Gamble and some other soap companies. Although this case is still a number of months from trial, Judge Hartshorne estimates that it is currently taking a full quarter of his time in pretrial conferences, writing of opinions on motion, and other interlocutory matters. The current inventory of civil cases pending in Newark, Trenton, and Camden is as follows: Inventory of pending civil cases as of Dec. 31, 1959

Breakdown of other active cases (category 5) by nature of suit

It is apparent that the pending caseloads at Trenton and Camden for one judge at each place are larger per judge than the pending load at Newark which has five judges. About 40 percent of the civil caseload is filed at Trenton and Camden and 40 percent of pending cases are in those places of holding court.

It is to Judge Forman's credit that from a badly congested docket situation he was able to bring the business to a practically current status. Judge Smith has expressed the opinion that another judge is necessary to keep the court in that condition and to cope with future increases in the business. Now, for the first time, where they have a choice of forum, some of the New Jersey lawyers are bringing their cases in the Federal district court instead of the State court of New Jersey because they can get quicker action in the Federal court.

The civil and criminal business of this district is shown by the following table:

The Judicial Conference of the United States has advocated for some time the creation of an additional judgeship for this court.

Respectfully submitted.

WILL SHAFROTH,

Chief of the Division of Procedural Studies and Statistics, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

FEBRUARY 12, 1960.

DISTRICT OF NEW JERSEY

TABLE 1.—Civil cases commenced and terminated, by fiscal year, and pending at the end of each year beginning with 1941

TABLE 2.-U.S. civil cases and criminal cases commenced and terminated, by fiscal year, and pending at the end of each year beginning with 1941

1 Price and rent control cases are separately listed from 1943 to 1953. In many of these years they constituted a large proportion of all civil cases commenced, although they required on the average a relatively small proportion of court time per case for disposition. They are included in the figure which they follow.

CRIMINAL CASES

[Cases transferred are not included in "Commenced" and "Terminated" columns]·

1 This column includes 86 districts for 1949 and thereafter; 84 districts before 194.

2 Immigration cases have been eliminated from this table because they occur in volume in only 5 districts on the Mexican border and because the average judicial time per case for their disposition is small.

1 The median time interval in months is computed for the civil cases in which a trial was held, which were terminated during the year, excluding land condemnation, habeas corpus and forfeiture proceedings. No median interval is shown for the years 1945 through 1952 where less than 25 cases were terminated after trial. For the year 1953 and subsequent years, where there were less than 25 cases terminated after trial, a median is listed with an asterisk on the basis of the number of cases terminated after trial for the last 2 years, provided there were 25 such cases for the 2 years.

The period from issue to trial and from filing to disposition for the fiscal years 1946 and 1947 for the district of New Jersey has been influenced by the trial of a number of veterans' reemployment cases, which were given priority and disposed of very promptly. These are not a measure of the normal progress of litigation. There were 13 of these cases tried in 1946 and 61 in 1947. If they are eliminated, the medians for the 2 years would be, from filing to disposition, 1946, 13 months, 1947, 16.1 months; and from issue to trial, 1946, 8.2 months, 1947, 13.3 months.