These tables are derived from information contained in 75 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions filed between September 1, 1995, and August 31, 1996. The total of 75 decisions does not include rulings arising from disciplinary proceedings against lawyers, which appear along with the decisions in the Supreme Court’s listing of opinions and dispositional orders for this period.
Occasionally, the Court’s listing of opinions contains separate entries for individual cases that were ultimately consolidated and resolved by a single decision. If two or more cases were combined in this manner, the decision is counted only once for the purposes of the following tables.
The year under consideration also witnessed an unusual outcome in Estate of Cavanaugh by Cavanaugh v. Andrade. Here, only Justices Bradley, Bablitch, and Day supported all portions of the “majority” opinion, while the other four justices dissented with regard to one portion or another. Consequently, I will include the case only in the “Opinions Authored” table, the “Days Between Oral Argument and Opinion Filing” table, and the “Number of Oral Arguments Presented” table.
Three additional cases—deadlocked (3-3) per curiam decisions (Ware v. Schoone; Thompson v. Jackson; and State v. Elam)—figure only in the “Number of Oral Arguments Presented” table. All of the decisions may be found on the Wisconsin Court System website. http://wicourts.gov/
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
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