With this week’s decisions, Crivello Carlson and Weiss Law Office each contributed a point to the Citations (for an amicus brief in Antoinette Lang v. Lions Club of Cudahy Wisconsin, Inc.)—thereby nudging the Citations over the Waivers back into second place.

Click here for the complete, updated standings.

This week’s decisions elevated the Waivers over the Citations into second place on the strength of five points from Boardman & Clark (for a brief and oral argument in DSG Evergreen Family Limited Partnership v. Town of Perry).

Click here for the complete, updated standings.

Three and a half years ago, we measured certain aspects of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s performance against corresponding activity at the supreme courts of Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan over the period 2013-14 through 2015-16. Since then, three more terms have gone into the books, providing enough information for another look at the output of these five judicial summits.[Continue Reading…]

The supreme court did not file any new decisions this week, and thus there are no changes in the standings.

The flurry of decisions filed this week produced a dramatic change in the standings. Although the league-leading Gavels of the State Public Defender’s Office maintained their hold on first place with 10 points for a brief, oral argument, and favorable decision in State v. Charles L. Neill, IV, there was upheaval below them. The once-dormant Citations burst into contention, vaulting over both the Affirmed and the Waivers into second place by amassing 18 points—10 from Hinshaw & Culbertson (brief, oral argument, and favorable outcome in Roger Choinsky v. Germantown School District Board of Education) and 8 from Godfrey & Kahn (brief and favorable outcome, also in Choinsky).

Click here for the complete, updated standings.

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, 1969, and August 31, 1970.  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).

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

With this week’s decisions, the Gavels of the State Public Defender’s Office picked up five points (for a brief and oral argument in Marathon County v. D. K.), padding their lead over the second-place Waivers.

Click here for complete, updated standings.

The supreme court did not file any new decisions this week, and thus there are no changes in the standings.

Although Justice Daniel Kelly has established himself as a resolute member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority, there appeared reason to surmise back in September of 2017—following his first term on the bench—that he would be more likely than the other new conservative justice, Rebecca Bradley, to chart an autonomous course on occasion.^[1] To be sure, this was far from certain, based on the justices’ voting records for 2016-17. Even in non-unanimous decisions, Justices Kelly and Bradley voted together 97% of the time, more frequently than any other pair of justices.

Still, grounds remained for predicting that Justice Kelly might become the closest thing to a nonconformist among conservatives because of the votes that he cast in Fourth Amendment cases. While the court’s three most conspicuous conservatives—Justices Roggensack, Ziegler, and Gableman—almost never accepted Fourth Amendment arguments (3%, 9%, and 8% of the time, respectively), Justice Kelly did so in 38% of the votes that he cast. This exceeded considerably the percentage for Justice R. Bradley (27%) and prompted a post titled “Justice Kelly a Maverick?” in the autumn of 2017.^[2][Continue Reading…]

The Supreme Court did not file any new decisions this week, and thus there are no changes in the standings.