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The Reverend R. Stephen Shuart is an Episcopal priest by profession. He is rector of two parishes and serves on the Diocesan Financial Committee and as a rural dean. However, he has spent most of his wage-earning life as owner/operator of Stephen Shuart Export Co., an internationally known photographic business, located in Kane, Pennsylvania. Shuart℉s unique entrepreneurial endeavor has been the subject of a televised news feature, and the object of camera collectorsʼ attention since his company℉s inception in the early 1970s.

This paper examines and tests the implications of the court congestion hypothesis of Posner (1972) and Priest (1989). This hypothesis suggests that the effects of delay reduction programs may be largely or completely offset by a resulting increase in demand for litigation. We also analyze the effect on the pace of litigation of certain factors not explicitly considered by the Posner-Priest model.

We find that a delay reduction program was successful in reducing the time to settlement, and the time to verdict for tried cases, over the period covered by the data. As for behavioral responses, there is no evidence of an increase in the trial rate; there is, however, strong evidence of an increase in the number of cases filed annually in the court in question. Other results are consistent with the model's predictions about the effects of the prejudgment rate of interest.