Wisconsin Case Law Search: Plain-English WI Case Law Research With Statewide-Binding Court of Appeals Precedent

How do I search Wisconsin case law?

Describe the issue as a full question rather than a string of keywords, and let the search return the controlling opinions. Because a published Wisconsin Court of Appeals opinion binds courts across the whole state, you are not hunting for the appellate district your county sits in the way you would in Ohio or Illinois. You are hunting for the earliest published opinion on your point that the Supreme Court has not disturbed.

Then separate the opinion types, because Wisconsin has three of them and they carry completely different weight. Published opinions bind. Unpublished authored opinions issued on or after July 1, 2009 are persuasive only. Per curiam opinions, memorandum opinions, and summary disposition orders cannot be cited at all, no matter how helpful the reasoning looks. A research answer that quotes a per curiam Wisconsin opinion as authority is wrong before anyone reads the merits.

Can the Wisconsin Court of Appeals overrule its own published decisions?

No. This is the rule that makes Wisconsin research different from almost every other state. In Cook v. Cook, 208 Wis. 2d 166, 560 N.W.2d 246 (1997), the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that only the supreme court has the power to overrule, modify, or withdraw language from a published opinion of the court of appeals. The reasoning was structural: if the court of appeals is to be a unitary court it must speak with a unified voice, and letting panels overrule each other would fracture that voice and destroy the predictability litigants and circuit courts rely on.

The practical consequence catches people out. When two published Court of Appeals opinions conflict, a circuit court and a later Court of Appeals panel must follow the earlier decision, because the later panel had no power to change it. The newest opinion is not automatically the governing one in Wisconsin. Michigan reaches a similar first-in-time result through MCR 7.215(J), but Michigan gives its panels an escape valve in the form of a special conflict panel. Wisconsin gives them none. The only way a published Wisconsin Court of Appeals opinion changes is a petition for review to the Supreme Court, and that argument is worth making only once you are actually in front of that court.

Can you cite an unpublished Wisconsin opinion?

Sometimes, and the line is narrower than most states draw it. Wis. Stat. (Rule) 809.23(3)(b) allows an unpublished opinion issued on or after July 1, 2009 to be cited for its persuasive value, but only if it is authored, meaning written by a member of a three-judge panel or by a single judge under section 752.31(2). The rule then says the quiet part out loud: a per curiam opinion, memorandum opinion, summary disposition order, or other order is not an authored opinion for this purpose. Those remain uncitable.

Even a properly citable unpublished opinion buys you less than it looks like. The rule states that because such an opinion is not precedent, it is not binding on any court of this state, that a court need not distinguish or otherwise discuss it, and that a party has no duty to research or cite it. So an unpublished Wisconsin opinion is a persuasive illustration you offer, not authority a judge has to answer. The Wisconsin Judicial Council petitioned for this change in January 2008 and the Supreme Court adopted it, with modifications, on a 6 to 1 vote after an October 2008 public hearing.