Tuesday’s post on amicus briefs noted, among other things, the steady decline in the number of these briefs filed with the Wisconsin Supreme Court over the past several years—in contrast to the growing number at the United States Supreme Court.  A reader has kindly directed my attention to Justice Abrahamson’s concurrence in State v. Loomis, which gives voice to her frustration over the court’s handling of motions for permission to file amicus briefs.

One aspect of Justice Abrahamson’s complaint is an assertion that the court’s orders granting or denying such motions have been opaque and inconsistent.  These “orders generally do not explain the court’s decision,” she observed.  “[T]hey do not guide lawyers and other interested persons in filing amicus briefs in future cases; and they do not provide the benefit of reasoned decisions so that the court can be thoughtful and consistent in its approach to amicus briefs.”[Continue Reading…]

“The amicus growth spurt is significant and shows no sign of slowing down,” observed two professors at William & Mary Law School in a post titled “The Amicus Machine.”  Writing about the United States Supreme Court, they furnished compelling evidence of an amicus proliferation of dramatic proportions.  In 2015-16, for instance, nearly every case before the justices included amicus briefs—863 in all, averaging 13 per case—roughly double the volume just two decades before.  It did not seem farfetched to proclaim, as the authors did in their opening sentence, that “we are living in the age of the Supreme Court amicus.”

No such declaration could be made for Wisconsin, however, where data from the last two decades reveal the largest number of amicus briefs in the middle third of the period, followed by a precipitous decline thereafter, as apparent in the table below.^[1]  Thus, an Amicus Age may be resplendent at the US Supreme Court, but only a muted equivalent glimmered in Madison, and it quickly expired.

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Expanded teams have been formed in anticipation of the law-firm Fantasy League’s second season (for details on the league and its new teams, click here).   Periodic scoring updates will be posted beginning early in 2017. 

During SCOWstats’s recent series of posts on the number of decisions filed by the supreme courts of Wisconsin and neighboring states, Victor Forberger kindly brought to my attention some interesting figures regarding the output of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (hereafter MSJC).  Not to put too fine a point on it, the MSJC files an enormous number of decisions each year by Midwestern standards, as the following table indicates.^[1]  Compare the MSJC average for the last three years (161 decisions/year) with the annual averages over a similar period for Wisconsin (52 decisions), Minnesota (91 decisions), Iowa (80 decisions), Illinois (66 decisions), and Michigan (27 decisions).^[2][Continue Reading…]

Our efforts to weigh the supreme court in Wisconsin against those in Minnesota and Iowa have found that the record compiled of late by the justices in Madison diverges from the performance of their colleagues in Minnesota and Iowa with regard to (1) the number of decisions filed per term, (2) the length of these decisions, and (3) certain measures of polarization.  Today, by adding the supreme courts of Illinois and Michigan to this enterprise, we’ll see if Wisconsin remains an outlier even after the inclusion of two more entries on our spectrum of state supreme courts.[Continue Reading…]

Last June, an examination of two measures of polarization among the justices of the Wisconsin and Minnesota Supreme Courts found significant differences between the two states but left open the question of which state’s figures were more “normal.” Only the inclusion of data from other states can lead to an answer, and we’ll take a step in this direction by inviting Iowa to join the portrait previously sketched of Wisconsin and Minnesota.[Continue Reading…]

Two posts this June compared the performances of the Wisconsin and Minnesota Supreme Courts and found significant differences.  As substantial as the contrasts were, however, the comparison of only two states made it impossible to conclude that one state’s supreme court was more unusual than the other’s regarding the topics under consideration.  To shed light on this question, the supreme courts in Wisconsin and Minnesota would have to be measured against courts from a sampling of other states, and we’ll begin the process today by adding Iowa’s supreme court to the discussion.^[1]

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Much has changed at the Wisconsin Supreme Court over the past 25 years, including all but one of the justices.^[1]  A pair of recent posts provided data regarding the supreme court’s activity at each end of this quarter century—1990-91 and 2015-16—which now furnish us an opportunity to compare these two terms with a focus on topics that have figured prominently in SCOWstats.

Number and Speed of Decisions
In certain respects, a comparison of the beginning and end of this 25-year interval accentuates trends already apparent for several years—developments such as the growing period of time required to generate a shrinking number of decisions.  Thus the 83 decisions filed in 1990-91 nearly doubled the total of 43 filed in 2015-16, yet the average period between oral argument and the filing of a decision was roughly a month and a half shorter in 1990-91 than in 2015-16 (91 days and 136 days respectively).[Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 83 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1990, and August 31, 1991.  The total of 83 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers and (2) various motions and petitions.

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

Writing jointly in State v. Lynch three weeks ago, Justices Shirley Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley observed that, “although we have not done a statistical analysis, our perception is that few of the court’s decisions this term have been unanimous without any separate writings …”  Now that the 2015-16 term has expired, we can answer certain questions implicit in the justices’ comment.  First, of course: What percentage of the decisions filed in 2015-16 were unanimous with no separate opinions?  Second: How does this percentage compare with those for other terms?  … And, apart from the issue of polarization, why might some of the justices find this development troubling?[Continue Reading…]