Supreme Court Workload Down By 48%
Huge drop in cases handled by state high court. Court of Appeals workload also way down.
Patience Roggensack
While Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Roggensack pushes for judicial pay raises of more than $20,000 annually, the number of decisions issued by judges on the state’s two appellate levels has fallen dramatically, statistics show.
Roggensack’s big boost request fell flat with Gov. Scott Walker. She wanted the state to spend $6.4 million per year on judicial pay increases, but Walker is proposing only $334,000 for 2018-2019 pay raises.
Walker did, however, recommend that the director of state courts figure out a judicial pay plan, which would be submitted to the Joint Committee on Employment Relations for approval. The director of state courts works for Roggensack’s Supreme Court.
Roggensack’s plan would have taxpayers footing bigger bills for judges — at least on the two appellate levels — who issue far fewer decisions than they used to.
Marquette University professor Alan Ball examined the State Supreme Court’s declining productivity on his excellent SCOWstats blog. He found the number of opinions issued declined from 83 in 1990-91 to 43 in 2015, a 48 percent decrease.
“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,)” Ball wrote.
The state’s own statistics show a big drop in Court of Appeals productivity as well. It closed 3,132 cases in 2006 but just 2,421 cases in 2016. a decline of almost 23 percent.
Case filings dropped as well. There were 3,078 cases filed with the Court of Appeals in 2006; in 2016, there were 2,426 filed, a 22 percent drop.
Gretchen Schuldt writes a blog for Wisconsin Justice Initiative, whose mission is “To improve the quality of justice in Wisconsin by educating the public about legal issues and encouraging civic engagement in and debate about the judicial system and its operation.”
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As a member of the bar for over 40 years, it is no mystery to me why there are fewer cases being appealed to the highest court in this state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has become a tool for the rich and powerful interests in this state. Most all of the “conservative” Justices owe their seats to huge inputs of campaign donations from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. They view their role as further comforting the comfortable. Although the U. S. Supreme Court has stated that it was unconstitutional in a West Virginia case for a Justice to take 2 million dollars in campaign donations from a party and then decide the case in that parties favor, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has adopted a rule that a Justice does not have to recuse his or herself from a case no matter how much money that party had given to the Justice in the form of the legalized bribery called “campaign donations”. It is a sad , sad degradation of integrity and dignity that has occurred in the past decade on our highest court in this state. My advice: keep your case in federal court if at all possible. There is at least a 50-50 chance of what used to be called Justice in that system.