These tables are derived from information contained in 50 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions filed between September 1, 2016, and the end of the court’s term in July, 2017.[1] The total of 50 decisions does not include the following items contained in the Supreme Court’s listing of opinions and dispositional orders for this period: (1) decisions arising from bar-admission issues and disciplinary proceedings against lawyers; and (2) orders pertaining to various motions and petitions.
Maya Elaine Smith v. Jeff Anderson, which resulted in a 3-2 per curiam decision that review had been improvidently granted, is not included.
Sometimes the Court’s listing of opinions and dispositional orders contains separate entries for individual cases that were consolidated and resolved by a single decision. If two or more cases were consolidated in this manner, the decision is counted only once for the purposes of the following tables.
In addition to the 50 decisions noted above, a deadlocked (3-3) per curiam decision was filed in Scott Smith v. Greg Kleynerman. This is included only in the “Number of Oral Arguments Presented” table.
The tables are available as a complete set and by individual topic according to the subsets listed below.
Four-to-Three Decisions
Decisions Arranged by Vote Split
Frequency of Justices in the Majority
Distribution of Opinion Authorship
Frequency of Agreement Between Pairs of Justices
Average Time Between Oral Argument and Opinions Authored by Each Justice
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies
[1] According to the Clerk’s office, no additional substantive decisions will be filed after July 7. The decisions may be found on the Wisconsin Court System website.
About Alan Ball
It has been brought to my attention that the State Public Defender’s Office should be credited with 15 oral arguments (rather than 14). The mistake occurred because Joseph Ehmann is listed on the title page of State v. Zimbal as filing an amicus brief, but not delivering an oral argument—when, in fact, he did participate in oral argument. Incidentally, the title page of State v. Suriano lists him, correctly, as filing an amicus brief and delivering oral argument. I am grateful to readers for alerting me about such errors, and I have made the necessary corrections in the tables in this post.