Crooks emerges as court's key swing vote

David Ziemer in the August 24, 2005 Wisconsin Law Journal.

The voting of the court this term, Justice Louis B. Butler's first, marks a significant shift from the court's previous term, in which Justice Patience Drake Roggensack was most often in the majority, and Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson was most frequently among the dissenters.

The term was only the second since Wisconsin Law Journal began tallying the justices' voting patterns - the 2000-01 term - that Abrahamson was not the most frequent dissenter.

During the most recent term, [Justice N. Patrick] Crooks was in the majority in 87 of the 91 cases in which he participated, dissenting an astonishingly low four times. That placed Crooks in the majority in 96 percent of cases.