THE DISTRICT OF NEW JERSEY

court

The District of New Jersey has three places of holding

Newark, Trenton and Camden.

Customarily, one judge

is stationed at Trenton, one at Camden, and the other five at Newark, At the present time there is a vacancy in the 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 1800 cases. At the same time, median time from filing to disposition increased until it reached twenty 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 1634 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 three 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 the 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 three 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 Proctor 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 pre-trial conferences, writing of opinions on motions, 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 DECEMBER 31, 1959