Wisconsin Supreme Court Statistics, 1963-64

These tables are derived from information contained in 293 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Nexis Uni search for decisions filed between September 1, 1963, and August 31, 1964.  The total of 293 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary matters involving lawyers, and (2) various petitions, motions, applications and the like (generally disposed of without oral argument and in short per curiam decisions).[1]

The decision filed on October 29, 1963 in State v. Hoyt (21 Wis. 2d 310) was withdrawn and replaced by a decision filed on June 5, 1964 (21 Wis. 2d 284).  Only the latter decision is included in these tables.

If identical decisions were listed twice under two different case numbers (e.g., Peterson v. Sinclair Refining Co.) or under the same case number (e.g., Racine v. Povkovich), I counted them only once. 

State ex rel. Reynolds v. Zimmerman (23 Wis. 2d 606), a per curiam ruling on legislative apportionment, is omitted.

Eight justices appear in several of the following tables, because Justice Beilfuss replaced Justice Brown on January 6, 1964.

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
Average Time Between Oral Argument and Opinions Authored by Each Justice

[1] Drake v. Farmers Mut. Auto. Ins. Co. (22 Wis. 2d 66A), which yielded a per curiam decision on a motion for rehearing (with no oral argument), is among the omitted decisions.  It is somewhat unusual in that three justices dissented.

About Alan Ball

Alan Ball is a Professor of History at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI.

alan.ball@marquette.edu

SCOWstats offers numerical analysis of the voting by Wisconsin Supreme Court justices on diverse issues over the past 91 years.

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