Law Commons^™

Counting To Four: The History And Future Of Wisconsin's Fractured Supreme Court, Jeffrey A. Mandell, Daniel J. Schneider

Marquette Law Review

Over the past decade, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has issued “fractured” opinions—decisions without majority support for any one legal rationale supporting the outcome—at an alarming clip. These opinions have confounded legal analysts, attorneys, and government officials due to their lack of majority reasoning, but also due to their length and the court’s particular procedures for assigning, drafting, and labelling opinions. This has become especially problematic where the court has issued fractured opinions in areas core to the basic functioning of state and local government, leaving the state without clear precedential guidance on what the law is. Yet, virtually no one …

Supreme Silence And Precedential Pragmatism: King V. Burwell And Statutory Interpretation In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Michael J. Cedrone

Marquette Law Review

This Article studies statutory interpretation as it is practiced in the federal

courts of appeal. Much of the academic commentary in this field focuses on the

Supreme Court, which skews the debate and unduly polarizes the field. This

Article investigates more broadly by looking at the seventy-two federal

appellate cases that cite King v. Burwell in the two years after the Court issued

its decision. In deciding that the words “established by the State” encompass

a federal program, the Court in King reached a pragmatic and practical result

based on statutory scheme and purpose at a fairly high level of …