These tables are derived from information contained in 304 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Nexis Uni search for decisions filed between September 1, 1925, and August 31, 1926. The total of 304 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 rejected until 1925-26. Such cases will be included in the tables for 1924-25.
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: (1) State ex rel. Park Falls Lumber Co. v. Stauber and State ex rel. Roddis Lumber & Veneer Co. v. Stauber; (2) Degutes v. State and State v. Groh; (3) Stoffle v. Hilker (189 Wis. 414) and Stoffle v. Hilker (189 Wis. 419); (4) White Construction Company v. Beloit and White Construction Company v. West Allis; (5) State ex rel. Morgan v. Dornbrook and State ex rel. Ennis v. Longbotham; (6) Mayfield Woolen Mills v. Goodrich & Martineau Co., Pollack v. Wilhelm, Herman Weiss Co. v. Goodrich & Martineau Co., and I. Fleischer & Sons v. Goodrich & Martineau Co.; (7) Fidelity & Casualty Company of New York v. Johnson and Maryland Casualty Co. v. Johnson; (8) Harding v. Jesse (189 Wis. 652) and Harding v. Jesse (189 Wis. 659); (9) Northwestern Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. State (189 Wis. 103) and Northwestern Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. State (189 Wis. 114).
Fox River Paper Co. v. Railroad Commission, Walters v. Utendorfer, and Barron v. Industrial Commission yielded deadlocked (3-3) votes and are not included.
The following tables contain eight justices because Justice Burr Jones decided not to seek reelection and was replaced at the beginning of January 1926 by Justice E. Ray Stevens (his former law partner). I am crediting Justice Jones with participation in the six decisions filed on January 2, 1926 (he wrote the majority opinion in most of them), but I can’t be certain whether either justice had a hand in any of the 31 decisions filed on January 12. Given that Justice Jones and Justice Stevens are not identified as participating in any of these cases—not as the author of a majority opinion, a separate opinion, or as someone who joined another justice’s separate opinion—I am guessing that neither justice took part in them. One should bear this assumption in mind when viewing the tables’ data for Justices Jones and Stevens.
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
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