We
wrote earlier this week about the new opinion drafting
procedure in Wisconsin's supreme court. To recap, the
state's justices voted 4-3 earlier this term to impose
deadlines on the drafting process, presumably in response to the
recent trend in which most of the court's work has been
released in the final weeks of its term.
We also noted that Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justice Bradley
have been critical of the new procedure's effect on separate
writings, claiming that the inflexible deadlines kept the court
from harmonizing its views in related cases. We thought that that
problem perhaps could have been solved by assigning similar cases,
especially if argued on the same day, to one justice—instead
of, as it happened the other day, assigning three cases on closely
related issues to three different justices under the court's
quirky "poker chip" assignment system.
