Nevada Supreme Court gets case number 60,000

A combination of rapid population growth and an ever-litigious public has the Nevada Supreme Court under siege.

One-third of the 60,000 cases submitted since statehood was ratified 148 years ago were filed in the past 9½ years, Supreme Court spokesman Bill Gang said.

To put that in perspective, it took 112 years for the high court to receive its 10,000th appeal, which was filed Aug. 12, 1977, according to Gang.

Thirty thousand cases were filed in the quarter-century between 1977 and 2002, Gang said, and 20,000 were submitted since then.

The 60,000th filing regards a complex homeowner association case with 74 defendants, Gang said.

Supreme Court Clerk Tracie Lindeman said her office will commemorate the milestone in some manner, but she told Gang it is a "dubious achievement because it simply emphasizes how the court's workload continues to grow."

There is no intermediate appellate court in Nevada. In 2010, voters in Clark County approved a state ballot question that sought to create such a court, but it failed everywhere else and was soundly defeated.

That leaves the seven justices to address every appeal, a task that Chief Justice Nancy Saitta said creates backlogs.

Saitta said that as filings exponentially increase, a "natural consequence" of such a caseload is that resolutions are delayed longer than they should be.

Saitta said that modern appeals are "complex and diverse" but that the court continues to work on improving efficiencies.

Nevada is among 11 states with no intermediate court. Of those, only West Virginia has a higher caseload.

Justices have moved a resolution through one session of the Legislature to bring back the issue to voters in 2014. As proposed, the appeals court would be a three-judge panel between the district courts and the Supreme Court.

The cost of the new court has been estimated at $1.6 million a year. Its judges would use existing state Supreme Court buildings and staff in Carson City and Las Vegas.

Contact reporter Doug McMurdo at dmcmurdo@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512.