What Do Circuit Judges Do? Not Much of it is Bankruptcy

A new report from the Fifth Circuit offers some interesting statistics on the work of the court of appeals. You can find the report here. During Fiscal Year 2010, the Court received 7,337 new appeals, just 1.1% of which were bankruptcy appeals. Nearly 64% of the appeals filed were either criminal or prisoner appeals. Bankruptcy was the second smallest category, beating out only mandamus cases at 0.3%. During Fiscal Year 2010, there were just 82 bankruptcy appeals, down from 130 in 2007. Only 12.5% of the appeals filed resulted in published opinions. I can't verify this, but in blogging about bankruptcy opinions, there seem to be a lot of published bankruptcy opinions. Does that mean that bankruptcy is a small but interesting part of the work of the court of appeals?