Each year, after the Gavels of the State Public Defender’s Office have won another Fantasy League title, the Competition Committee approves measures to strengthen the other teams.  Thus, for the 2019-20 season, the four challengers were allowed to add another law firm to their rosters, thereby creating the most formidable set of challengers ever faced by the defending champion.  Or so it seemed—until the Gavels torched all their opponents before the arrival of spring and cruised to their fifth consecutive title.  In their most dominant performance yet, they led from wire to wire and won by the largest margin in the league’s history. [Continue Reading…]

Armed with findings from the supreme court’s just-completed term, we can compare the justices’ activity in several areas with their corresponding performances during previous terms.  Last year, all these measures of the court’s work extended recent trends—but not one of them did so in 2019-20.[Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 45 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions filed between September 1, 2019, and the end of the court’s term in the summer of 2020.  The total of 45 decisions omits orders pertaining to various motions, petitions, and disciplinary matters, but it does include Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 1 v. Robin Vos and Nancy Bartlett v. Tony Evers.  Given that these two decisions contain some odd features (to be discussed in a subsequent post), they will figure in only some of the following tables (as indicated by footnotes).

Waukesha County v. J.J.H. and State v. Kelly James Kloss were dismissed as improvidently granted and are not considered here.

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

Now that the supreme court has filed its last substantive decision of the 2019-20 term, we can begin our customary series of posts on various aspects of the justices’ work over the past 12 months.  Along the way, we’ll encounter some surprises.

Number of decisions filed
These summaries normally start by comparing the term’s volume of decisions with the totals filed during other terms, both recent and remote.  This year the change was dramatic.  From 58 decisions in 2018-19 (and 62 in 2017-18), the total plunged to 45 in 2019-20.  This approached the modern-day low of 43, as shown in Graph 1.[Continue Reading…]

This week’s harvest of decisions was unusually bountiful—especially for the Writs and the Waivers—and, as a result, the standings have tightened considerably.  The long-dormant Writs led the scoring, with 16 points from Pines Bach (for a brief, oral argument, and favorable outcome in Kathleen Papa v. DHS and a brief, oral argument, and partially-favorable outcome in Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 1 v. Robin Vos) and 10 points from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (for a brief, oral argument, and mostly-favorable outcome in Nancy Bartlett v. Tony Evers and an amicus brief in Service Employees).

Meanwhile, three different firms on the Waivers contributed points: Husch Blackwell (7 points for a brief and mostly-favorable outcome in Service Employees), Hawks Quindel (4 points for a brief and partially-favorable outcome in Service Employees), and Quarles & Brady (1 point for an amicus brief in Kathleen Papa). 

Godfrey & Kahn rounded out the scoring with 5 points (for a brief and oral argument in WSBU v. Joel Brennan), thereby moving the Citations up in the standings.

This week’s decisions rewarded the Gavels of the State Public Defender’s Office with five points (for a brief and oral argument in State v. Courtney C. Brown) and the Citations with two points (for amicus briefs from Godfrey & Kahn in State v. Courtney C. Brown and from the Frank J. Remington Center in State v. Timothy E. Dobbs).

Click here for complete, updated standings.

A few years ago, a post on the percentage of court of appeals opinions that were issued as per curiam decisions noted the enormous decrease in the total number of court of appeals opinions in recent decades. Today, we’ll return to the field to determine the number and percentage of court of appeals decisions that were published. Given that only published decisions may be cited as precedential authority, they are of primary importance to members of the legal community—who might find the following trends concerning.[Continue Reading…]

The Gavels of the State Public Defender’s Office may have built an insurmountable lead this week by picking up ten points (for a brief, oral argument, and favorable outcome) in State v. Alfonso Lorenzo Brooks. We’ll see if any of the other teams have a late rush in them over the last few weeks of the term.

Click here for complete, updated standings.

The two decisions filed this week did not deliver any points to league teams–hence, no change in the standings.

Many luminaries in the legal profession have remarked to the effect that “An activist court is one whose decisions you don’t like.”^[1] Scholarly attempts to define judicial activism suggest a number of other factors to consider, and today I’d like to offer readers an opportunity to contemplate whether the supreme court’s frequent embrace of “original actions” should be included in the list of criteria.[Continue Reading…]