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…]

A forthcoming article (“State Criminal Appeals Revealed”) in the Vanderbilt Law Review furnishes the impetus for today’s post on felony appeals in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  Utilizing a dataset released recently by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for State Courts—described in the law review article as “the first and only publicly available national dataset on state criminal appeals”—the authors (Michael Heise, Nancy J. King, and Nicole Heise) derived their information from a random, “nationally representative probability sample of criminal appeals resolved in 2010” by state supreme courts and lower appellate courts across the nation.^[1][Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 133 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1982, and August 31, 1983.  The total of 133 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers, and (2) various motions and petitions.  Nor does the total include State ex rel. James Sykes v. Circuit Court for Milwaukee County, in which review was dismissed on grounds of mootness.

Also excluded are (1) In the Matter of Implementation of Felony Sentencing Guidelines, and (2) Report of Committee to Review the State Bar.  These were actions without case numbers, briefing, or oral argument and that resulted in 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
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies

We now have opinions by two new justices and decisions from three more terms (2014-15 through 2016-17) to add to our initial discussion of Fourth Amendment cases, so it’s time for an update.^[1]   A number of recent developments are noteworthy, including the growing portion of the docket devoted to Fourth Amendment cases, which represented a larger percentage of the court’s cases during the past three years than in any other three-year period of the 22 terms under consideration.  As shown in Table 1, the 2016-17 term surpassed all others in this regard, when 18% of the court’s decisions addressed Fourth Amendment arguments, and the second highest figure (15%) was recorded in 2014-15.  In broader perspective, the six highest percentages all came during the last nine terms, when the court’s share of Fourth Amendment cases (10%) doubled the average for the previous 13 terms.^[2][Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 118 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1983, and August 31, 1984.  The total of 118 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers and judges, and (2) various motions and petitions.

In re Judicial Administration: Felony Sentencing Guidelines, a per curiam decision in which the court declined an invitation from the legislature to issue felony sentencing guidelines, is not included in any of the following tables.  This action had no case number, and there was no briefing or oral argument.

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