These tables are derived from information contained in 194 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Nexis Uni search for decisions filed between September 1, 1917, and August 31, 1918. The total of 194 decisions does not include various orders pertaining to petitions, motions, and disciplinary matters involving lawyers and judges.
Cases are omitted if they were decided during the previous term but appeared in the search results because motions for reconsideration were not decided until 1917-18. Such cases will be included in the tables for 1916-17.
Also omitted are two deadlocked (3-3) cases: ESTATE OF CARTER: STATE v. CARTER and Rathenberger v. Jacob.
When two (or more) cases were in effect consolidated—one was simply said to be ruled by the decision in the other—the cases are counted as only one. For instance: Simon v. de Gersdorff (166 Wis. 170) and Simon v. de Gersdorff (166 Wis. 177).
Eight justices appear in the tables because Walter Owen defeated incumbent Justice Roujet Marshall in April 1917. Justice Marshall remained on the court until January 7, 1918, when Justice Owen replaced him. It is generally possible to determine if Justice Marshall or Justice Owen participated in decisions filed shortly after January 7, and thus I included both men in the tables. However, I occasionally had to guess from internal evidence whether one or the other of the two justices took part, and this should be borne in mind when viewing the statistics.
The tables are available as a complete set and by individual topic in 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
