civics: Comparing the Supreme Courts of Wisconsin and its Neighbors—2023-24
Years have passed since our last comparison of midwestern supreme courts, so let’s return for a look at four indicators: (1) the number of decisions filed; (2) the length of these decisions; (3) the number of separate opinions; and (4) the distribution of vote margins. As Minnesota and Iowa once served as the starting point for these posts, we’ll begin again with them.
Number of decisions
Previous posts found that the justices in Minnesota and Iowa issued much larger volumes of decisions than did their colleagues in Wisconsin, and this gap became enormous in 2023-24 due to the surprising plunge in the number of decisions filed last term in the Badger State. As shown in Table 1, the totals for Minnesota and Iowa were more than six times the output in Wisconsin.[1]
