The court did not file any decisions this past week—hence, no change in the standings.

The two decisions filed this past week did not result in any points for Fantasy League teams—hence, no change in the standings.

Both decisions filed this week resulted in points for the league’s competitors.  The Gavels added five points (for a brief and oral argument in State v. Arberry) and remain atop the standings.  However, their lead shrank considerably as the Affirmed closed to within four points, thanks to a 10-point performance by Lindner & Marsack (for a brief, oral argument, and favorable outcome in Manitowoc Company v. Lanning).

Click here for current standing.

As the court enters a six-month stretch during which the large majority of the year’s decisions will be filed, a SCOWstats reader has asked how things stand regarding the number of cases likely to be decided by the end of the 2017-18 term.  We have been offering such predictions at roughly this time of year ever since Justice Abrahamson voiced concern on the subject in the autumn of 2015, and this post amounts to a continuation of that practice by responding to the reader’s question.^[1][Continue Reading…]

Fantasy-league teams participated in all three of the cases decided this week, with the result that the Gavels moved back into first place on the strength of two 5-point plays (briefs and oral arguments in State v. Smith and State v. Washington).  Meanwhile, the Waivers got on the board with 5 points contributed by von Briesen & Roper (a brief and oral argument in Metropolitan Associates v. City of Milwaukee).

Click here for current standings.

These tables are derived from information contained in 123 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1981, and August 31, 1982.  The total of 123 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers, and (2) various motions and petitions.

Another case, State ex rel. Badger Produce Co. v. Equal Opportunity Commission, resulted in a deadlocked (3-3) per curiam decision and is included only in the “number of oral arguments presented” table.

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
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies

Now that the Supreme Court has filed several decisions, the scoring is underway in the fantasy league’s third season.  The Gavels tallied first with five points for a brief and oral argument in State v. Breitzman, but the Writs responded (with a brief and oral argument from the Sesini Law Group in State v. Reyes) to pull even with the defending champions.  Almost at once, though, the Affirmed nudged ahead (with six points from Axley Brynelson for a brief, an oral argument, and a 3-3 per curiam decision in In Re: Partnership Health Plan, Inc. v. Office of the Commissioner of Insurance). 

Click here for the current standings.

The 2017-18 law-firm fantasy-league season is now underway.  Click here to learn about the offseason acquisition that has fans of one team anticipating an upset of the defending-champion Gavels.

Our two most recent posts have utilized statistics from a Vanderbilt Law Review article in order to compare certain types of Wisconsin Supreme Court rulings with the decisions filed by other state supreme courts.^[1]  The law review article reached a number of conclusions that seem provocative when measured against Wisconsin’s experience, and this post addresses another such finding.

Nationwide, the article observed, publicly-funded lawyers (public defenders and publicly-funded private-bar lawyers taken together) were approximately twice as likely to obtain favorable results in state supreme courts as were private attorneys in cases that met the study’s criteria: no capital cases, no appeals filed by the State rather than by defendants, and no misdemeanors.  This post will determine whether the same can be said of Wisconsin.[Continue Reading…]

Last month’s post made use of a forthcoming article (“State Criminal Appeals Revealed”) in the Vanderbilt Law Review, which presented findings from a national dataset on criminal appeals resolved in 2010 by state supreme courts and lower appellate courts throughout the nation.  Regarding state supreme courts, the authors (Michael Heise, Nancy J. King, and Nicole Heise) extracted a representative sample of 1,425 cases in which defendants sought review.  From these 1,425 cases, review was granted in 89, and it was this subset of 89 cases that provided a national “standard” or “average” against which we measured decisions filed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in cases that met the criteria specified by the authors of the law review article: no capital cases, no appeals filed by the State rather than by defendants, and no misdemeanors.

After directing our attention last month to the frequency with which defendants received favorable decisions from the Wisconsin Supreme Court compared to state supreme courts nationwide, we now take a closer look at the data by dividing the cases into several categories of crimes.  The crimes in question here are the “original” or underlying crimes alleged to have been committed—as distinct from the issues before the supreme courts (which might center on any number of other things, such as the admissibility of evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel, or the jury-selection process).  From 2004-05 through 2016-17 the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided 163 cases fitting the criteria described above, and, in Table 1, I have divided these cases into the categories of crimes selected by the authors of the law review article.^[1]  (The year 2010 did not yield enough decisions in Wisconsin to populate several categories in the table, so I drew Wisconsin’s decisions from the same 13-year interval covered in the previous post.)[Continue Reading…]