Apelar una sentencia judicial vs. aceptar la resolución original
Si actúas
Apelar la sentencia judicial
86%
Si no actúas
Aceptar la sentencia original sin apelar
60%
Porcentaje de quienes luego se arrepienten de cada elección. Las barras y el registro completo aparecen abajo.
Financiero
Última revisión 2026-05-09
Calidad de la evidencia 3.63/5
Puntuación de revisión en ocho dimensiones según la
rúbrica de calidad
. Cada dimensión puntuada de 1 a 5.
D1 Verificación de fuentes
4/5
D2 Autoridad e independencia de las fuentes
4/5
D3 Precisión de la tasa de arrepentimiento
1/5
D4 Comparabilidad de las fuentes
2/5
D5 Patrón de Gilovich
5/5
D6 Calidad de la prosa
4/5
D7 Completitud de las advertencias
5/5
D8 Calidad de la muestra
4/5
Media3.63/5
Datos sustitutos — no existe ninguna encuesta directa sobre el arrepentimiento para esta decisión. Las tasas se derivan de puntuaciones de satisfacción y datos de barreras de acceso en lugar de preguntas que preguntaban directamente sobre el arrepentimiento. Ver advertencias más abajo.
Arrepentimiento por acción
Apelar la sentencia judicial
86%
~86% de las apelaciones civiles en tribunal federal no resultan en reversión del fallo del tribunal inferior
Litigantes civiles privados en tribunales federales de apelaciones de EE.UU.
año calendario 2021, disposiciones de méritos
Arrepentimiento por inacción
Aceptar la sentencia original sin apelar
60%
~30% proxy: proporción de perdedores en primera instancia que no apelan a pesar de motivos potencialmente meritorios (estimación de acceso a la justicia)
Litigantes civiles que recibieron fallos adversos en juicio en tribunales de EE.UU.
proxy transversal, 2022
% que se arrepienten de esta elección
Apelar la sentencia judicialAceptar la sentencia original sin apelar
86%60%
action dominates — Domina la acción — la mayoría se arrepiente de actuar.
Decisiones relacionadas
Decisiones semánticamente similares — mismo terreno, distintos compromisos.
Prestar dinero a familiares o amigosNegarse a prestar dinero a familiares o amigos
35%26%
Acción dominante
Arrepentimiento por acción 1.3× mayor
Across all case types in US federal courts, roughly 86% of civil appellants
do not achieve reversal of the lower court’s judgment — the figure is most
favorable for private civil disputes (approximately 14% reversal rate), worse
across the overall caseload (8.2%). Spending the time and money to appeal
results in the original ruling standing in the vast majority of cases. On the
inaction side, federal appellate-filing data suggests a majority of civil
litigants who lose at trial never appeal at all: an analysis of federal civil
cases found a 39.6% appeal rate among tried cases, implying that roughly 60%
go uncontested — for some out of cost, lack of counsel, or low awareness of
appellate rights, and for others because they correctly judge their odds of
reversal are poor — leaving many with outcomes they believed were wrong but
never contested.
The decision to appeal sits in a distinctive position among legal choices: it
is almost always made after an already costly first proceeding, the odds are
quantifiably long before the filing is made, and the costs of the action are
immediate while potential benefits are speculative. Appeals courts are
explicitly deferential to trial courts — the “any reasonable trier of fact”
standard in civil cases means that many judgments that appear wrong to the
losing party are legally unreviewable. The anti-plaintiff pattern in appellate
outcomes shows up clearly in the available data: one Cornell Law/Journal of
Empirical Legal Studies analysis found plaintiff appellants achieved reversal
in about 4% of adverse trial judgments, versus about 10% for defendants — a
pattern that analysis found held across case types — meaning individuals
bringing claims may face steeper uphill odds than institutional defendants
with experienced appellate counsel.
The regret calculus here is complicated by the multiple functions an appeal
can serve. Some appellants file to force a settlement renegotiation, not
because they expect to win at the appellate level — in those cases, even an
unsuccessful appeal may achieve the desired outcome and generate no regret.
The inaction side is equally ambiguous: many litigants who accept an adverse
judgment have correctly assessed that their grounds for appeal are thin, and
acceptance is a rational response rather than resigned defeat. The Gilovich
temporal model predicts that regret about inaction grows over time — people
who never fought a ruling they thought unjust may carry that grievance for
years — while the disappointment of a failed appeal fades as appellants adapt
to the outcome. The point estimates here are the weakest in this dataset and
should be read as directional rather than quantitative.
Fuentes: acción
Registro de evidencia
Cada número a continuación es lo que reportó cada fuente, con la cita textual en la que nos basamos y cómo llegamos a nuestra cifra. Haz clic en cualquier enlace para verificarlo directamente.
[1]Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — Just the Facts: U.S. Courts of Appeals
Informe gubernamental
Fewer than 9% of total appeals in 2015 resulted in reversals; private civil cases saw the highest civil reversal rate at 14.2%
Extracto
“"Fewer than 9 percent of total appeals resulted in reversals of lower court decisions in 2015." [Paraphrase from the article's Table 2, a statistical table:] Bankruptcy appeals had the highest reversal rate of any category, at 24.4 percent. Among civil categories specifically, private civil cases had the highest reversal rate at 14.2 percent, followed by U.S. civil appeals at 4.2 percent. Prisoner petition appeals had a 4.6 percent reversal rate, and the overall reversal rate across all categories was 8.6 percent.
”
Datos de la fuente de
2016-12-20
Accedido
2026-07-07
Cálculo
US Courts administrative data for 2015. The 14.2% reversal rate for private civil cases is the highest civil reversal category and is used as the most favorable benchmark. Under this rate, approximately 86% of private civil appellants do not obtain a reversal. More recent data (calendar year 2021, ~28,000 merits dispositions) confirms the overall reversal rate at approximately 8.2%, making the 14.2% for private civil cases an upper bound. The action regret proxy rate of 0.86 = 1 - 0.14 (using the most favorable category). It represents the share of appellants who spend money and time on appeal and do not achieve reversal. This is outcome inferiority rather than felt regret, but it is the closest available proxy.
[2]Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — Table B-5. U.S. Courts of Appeals—Decisions in Cases Terminated on the Merits (12-Month Period Ending December 31, 2021)
Informe gubernamental
Of more than 28,000 cases terminated on the merits in the 12-month period ending December 31, 2021, about 2,300 resulted in reversal — an overall reversal rate of 8.2%
Extracto
“[Paraphrase from Table B-5, a statistical table.] Table B-5 reports "U.S. Courts of Appeals—Decisions in Cases Terminated on the Merits, by Nature of Proceeding—During the 12-Month Period Ending December 31, 2021." The total row shows roughly 28,000 cases decided on the merits with the reversed column totaling about 2,300 cases, yielding the "8.2" percent overall reversal rate reported in the table's reversed- percentage column.
”
Datos de la fuente de
2021-12-31
Accedido
2026-05-09
Cálculo
2021 data from Table B-5 of the Statistical Tables for the Federal Judiciary (12-month period ending December 31, 2021). The 8.2% overall reversal rate (all case types, ~2,300 reversals out of ~28,000 merits terminations) confirms that most appeals fail. Private civil cases fare better than average (14.2% per 2015 data), so we use 14.2% as the reversal rate, giving an implied 85.8% non-reversal rate, rounded to 0.86 for the action regret proxy.
Fuentes: inacción
Registro de evidencia
Cada número a continuación es lo que reportó cada fuente, con la cita textual en la que nos basamos y cómo llegamos a nuestra cifra. Haz clic en cualquier enlace para verificarlo directamente.
[1]Legal Services Corporation / NORC at the University of Chicago — The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans (2022)↗ 1 other entry
Informe gubernamental
92% of civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help; legal aid organizations must decline approximately half of all requests due to resource constraints
Extracto
“"For 92% of their substantial civil legal problems, low-income Americans do not get the legal help they need. Legal aid organizations receiving LSC funding must decline approximately half of all requests due to insufficient resources, leaving an estimated 1.4 million problems annually without adequate assistance."
”
Datos de la fuente de
2022-04-01
Accedido
2026-05-09
Cálculo
Retained as background context only. This report documents severe access-to-justice constraints in US civil legal aid generally, but it contains no statistic on appeal rates or on litigants who forgo appealing a judgment specifically, so it is not used to derive the inaction-side regret_rate. It supports the qualitative point that cost barriers and lack of counsel are real and large, which may explain part of why civil litigants who lose at trial do not appeal — see the Eisenberg & Clermont source below for the actual regret_rate derivation.
[2]Cornell Law School / Journal of Empirical Legal Studies — Appeal Rates and Outcomes in Tried and Nontried Cases: Further Exploration of Anti-Plaintiff Appellate Outcomes
Revisado por pares
The appeal rate is 39.6% in tried civil cases (versus 10.0% in nontried cases); the complement implies about 60% of tried-case losers do not appeal at all
Extracto
“"Federal data sets covering district court and appellate court civil cases for cases terminating in fiscal years 1988 through 2000 are analyzed. Appeals are filed in 10.9 percent of filed cases, and 21.0 percent of cases if one limits the sample to cases with a definitive judgment for plaintiff or defendant. The appeal rate is 39.6 percent in tried cases compared to 10.0 percent of nontried cases. Defendants achieve reversal of adverse trial court judgments in about 10 percent of filed cases and suffer affirmance in about 15 percent of such cases. Plaintiffs achieve reversal in about 4 percent of adverse trial court judgments and suffer affirmance in about 16 percent of such cases."
”
Datos de la fuente de
2004-11-01
Accedido
2026-07-07
Cálculo
Eisenberg & Clermont's Cornell study of federal civil cases terminating FY1988-2000 (Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2004). The paper reports a 39.6% appeal rate in tried cases — cases that reached a trial-level judgment, matching this decision's "adverse judgment at trial" population. Because appeals are filed overwhelmingly by the losing or aggrieved side, this appeal rate is used as a proxy for the share of trial losers who contest the judgment; its complement, 1 - 0.396 = 0.604, rounded to 0.60, is the inaction-side regret proxy — the share who do not appeal at all. This replaces a prior "roughly one-third" estimate that this entry's own calculation_notes previously admitted had no traceable derivation from any cited source; that figure has been removed as unsupported. This remains a non-appeal rate, not a felt-regret rate — it does not separate rational acceptance (correctly assessed low odds, cost) from genuine regret, and the underlying data is federal, 1988-2000 vintage, not a current nationally representative sample. The reversal figures above (4% plaintiffs, ~10% defendants) corroborate the anti-plaintiff pattern discussed elsewhere in this entry but are not used in the regret_rate calculation.
Advertencias
MEDICIONES PROXY EN AMBOS LADOS — el regret_delta de 0,56 debe tratarse con cautela significativa. La tasa del lado de acción (0,86) es el complemento de la tasa de reversión para casos civiles privados (14,2%), la categoría civil de mayor reversión. Mide inferioridad del resultado, no arrepentimiento sentido: muchos apelantes sabían que tenían bajas probabilidades y apelaron de todos modos por demora, palanca en negociaciones de acuerdo o para preservar derechos — pueden no lamentar apelar incluso después de perder. La tasa del lado de inacción (0,30) es un proxy conservador de acceso a la justicia con amplia incertidumbre; es el ancla más débil en esta entrada y la verdadera tasa de arrepentimiento por inacción entre quienes aceptaron fallos adversos es desconocida. La gran delta aparente (la acción domina) puede ser un artefacto del desajuste proxy. En la práctica, el modelo temporal de Gilovich predeciría que el arrepentimiento por inacción crece con el tiempo mientras el arrepentimiento por acción se desvanece, haciendo esta entrada consistente con dominancia eventual de inacción en horizontes más largos. Las apelaciones civiles y penales tienen dinámicas muy diferentes.
