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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Counting To Four: The History And Future Of Wisconsin's Fractured Supreme Court, Jeffrey A. Mandell, Daniel J. Schneider
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 …
How Circuits Can Fix Their Splits, Wyatt G. Sassman
How Circuits Can Fix Their Splits, Wyatt G. Sassman
Marquette Law Review
The desire to avoid conflicts between the regional circuits of the federal courts of appeals, commonly known as “circuit splits,” has had an immense influence on the structure and operation of the federal appellate courts for roughly a century. Over time, the Supreme Court has been assigned responsibility for resolving these conflicts. Yet as overall federal caseloads have increased, this reliance on the Supreme Court has imposed serious and well-recognized burdens on the operation of the federal courts. For decades scholars have debated bold proposals to address these problems, such as creating a new national court dedicated to resolving conflicts …