Many courts, especially appellate courts, process cases in numerical order according to docket number. This means that when you take a case there, you take a number and wait your turn.
That is the general rule. There are exceptions. In Louisiana, the legislature has enacted numerous laws, scattered throughout the codes and Revised Statutes, mandating that certain classes of cases either be decided in preference to others or decided within an expedited time frame. Southern University law professor Gail S. Stephenson has written an article exploring these laws. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
This article explores the history of docket preferences in Louisiana, unearths the buried statutes so that practitioners can use them if they choose, examines Louisiana’s procedural rules for requesting and applying the preferences, discusses the constitutional and ethical issues connected to docket preferences, and suggests improvements to the rules that would make them more effective.
Prof. Stephenson has also created this handy list of Louisiana laws requiring preferential or expedited decisions in various kinds of cases (MS Word format).
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