Today’s court is an embodiment of change – both in its personalities and its efforts to streamline and make transparent its work within the constraints of judicial independence and the “binds of amity” with its co-equal branches mandated by the Constitution. The days of Doe or even Kenison couldn’t easily contemplate a day when two justices would be women and oral arguments could be watched by members of the public on a computer screen in their home in Milan, New Hampshire or across the globe in Milan, Italy.

Perhaps the most significant change in today’s court is the staggering caseload the current justices have taken on in the aftermath of the 2000 impeachment crisis. For almost two centuries most cases came to the Supreme Court by a Bill of Exceptions. An attorney could not appeal a ruling of the trial court unless there was an objection and an exception. The trial judge would say “your exception is noted” and that preserved the issue for appeal. Exceptions were no longer needed after the Supreme Court adopted the Rules of Evidence in 1985 (See Rule 103(e). Prior to the 1985 rules, objections relating to evidence issues were based on caselaw.

With the 1901 creation of a five justice Supreme Court judges did the research in the State law library and wrote their own opinions. Law clerks were first hired in the late 1970’s. Every case until 1979 was accepted if timely, exceptions were reserved, etc.

As an example of the increase in caseload in 1931 the court published 55 opinions. By 1977 the caseload had risen to several hundred new cases a year. The thickest volume of the New Hampshire Reports is volume 117 from 1977 which included 247 opinions. In 1979, the court went to discretionary review for noncriminal cases to keep the caseload from requiring an intermediate appellate court. Under that procedure the court accepted only about 40% of appeals.

The legislature in 2001 created an “Appellate System Reform Commission” to study issues related to the court’s appellate caseload. That Commission concluded in its final report that citizens who come to the justice system “should have a right to secure at least one level of appellate review.”

On January 1, 2004, the Supreme Court began accepting all appeals from the trial courts for the first time since 1979. The current system caused an increase in accepted cases from 347 in 2003 to 645 in 2004. Oral arguments and full opinions have declined but overall case dispositions have risen from 893 (2003) to 983 (2008). The system has been modified to reduce the number of nonfinal divorce appeals.

New Hampshire Supreme Court Case Filings 2003-2008

	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
Cases filed	842	898	938	953	924	948
Cases Accepted	347	645	733	673	629	623
Oral Arguments:
Full Court	193	182	138	174	168	156
3JX	80	95	91	88	99	68
Total	273	277	229	262	267	224
Case Dispositions	893	721	884	879	1096	983
Disposition rate (disposition/filings	106.06%	80.28%	94.24%	92.24%	118.61%	103.69%
Cases pending at year-end	338	523	671	745	573	538