These tables are derived from information contained in 58 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions filed between September 1, 2018, and the end of the court’s term in the summer of 2019. The total of 58 decisions omits orders pertaining to various motions, petitions, and disciplinary matters, but it does include three deadlocked (3-3) per curiam decisions. As the court no longer indicates how each justice voted in these deadlocked cases, they are included only in the “Number of Oral Arguments Presented” table.
Normally, when two cases have been consolidated and resolved with a single decision (as in Enbridge Energy Company, Inc. v. Dane County), I record this as one case. However, with State v. Raytrell K. Fitzgerald and Raytrell K. Fitzgerald v. Circuit Court for Milwaukee Co., we have a more unusual situation. These two cases were consolidated and handled in a single decision—but, they were argued separately (that is, in two different oral-argument “slots” and consolidated thereafter) and decided by different votes (6-0 and 3-3). Thus, I have counted them as two separate cases in the tables that follow.
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
About Alan Ball
Alan,
Thank you for work. I am a municipal Clerk/Treasurer working Saturdays and evenings to provide voters with early voting opportunities in my community of Waterloo (pop. 3,371) for the February primary and the other 2020 elections. When sharing our early voting hours via Facebook and other communication channels, I’m referencing your statistics in a generic manner to inform citizens about the percentage of close votes in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Again, thank you.
Thank you very much for taking the time to comment. I’m glad to learn that the site has been useful for you on occasion–the best sort of encouragement for me.
Sincerely,
Alan