PTSD: From Board Denial to Court Reversal

What this is computed from: the 843 opinions and orders the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims chose to publish (1996–2026), taken from the Court's own site and read by rule — the disposition from each decision's holding sentence, the reasoning type and conditions from the decision text, and every quoted passage verbatim from the cited decision with the veteran's name removed. No model summaries. Of 1,201 published documents, 83 petitions, 144 attorney-fee (EAJA) decisions, 48 procedural orders, 2 unreadable files, 8 documents without a docket number are excluded and 73 could not be classified, leaving 843. Published decisions are not all decisions: the Court decides roughly 8–9,000 appeals a year, most by unpublished single-judge decision or on the parties' joint motion; the official disposition counts below come from the Court's annual report, never from this sample. Selection effect: only Board decisions a veteran chose to appeal reach the Court, so no figure here describes all Board denials. Data build: 2026-10-07 (method v2, September 2026 — replaces an earlier build that used machine summaries of a mixed-court search corpus).