Wisconsin State Court System Analysis

I began by examining the structure of each state 's court system as outlined by their respective website. I began in Wisconsin where the lowest courts are municipal courts. Wisconsin has 237 municipal courts staffed by 240 municipal judges. The largest municipal court is in Milwaukee and is staffed by three full time judges and hears more than 110,000 cases yearly. Municipal courts hear cases from a wide variety of cases, including traffic, parking, building code violations, trespassing, health code violations, animal control violation, truancy, and first time drunk driving offences. Wisconsin allows municipalities to combine their courts as well. Judges are elected by the municipality they serve.

Two hundred forty-nine judges in seventy-two

The state supreme court appoints one of the elected judges in each district to be the chief justice of the district. The chief justice handles the administrative duties of his or her district. The chief justice also appoints a deputy chief justices to perform the above duties, if the chief justice is unable to do so.

The third level in the Wisconsin State court system is the court of appeals, which was created in 1978. The court was originally designed to hear 1,200 cases per year. The court also takes a majority of its cases on mandatory jurisdiction as the court of immediate appeal for the circuit courts. The court of appeals consist of sixteen judges divided into four districts. The judges are elected in district wide elections, and they serve six year terms.

The Wisconsin State Supreme Court serves as the court of last resort. Seven justices are elected in a state wide election to serve ten year terms. The Wisconsin Supreme Court receives about 1000 petitions per year and, and they accept between one hundred and one hundred twenty cases each year. The Supreme Court also has administrative authority over the inferior courts of

The Idaho website was much harder to navigate than the Wisconsin site, however I was able to secure much of the same information. The lowest level of courts in Idaho is the Magistrate Court, and it consists of eighty-seven judges. The Magistrate Court only has original jurisdiction in misdemeanors, minor civil cases, juvenile cases, family law, and estates and trusts. The District Courts of Idaho serve as the court of appeals for the Magistrate Court as well as have original jurisdiction in some additional areas. The additional areas of original jurisdiction include major family law and major civil cases. The structure of the Idaho District Courts is as follows. Seven districts across the states contain anywhere from four to ten counties each. Forty-two district judges oversee these courts.

The state of Idaho has one Court of Appeals consisting of a chief justice and three associate justices. The court must take the cases assigned to it by the Idaho State Supreme Court. The Idaho State Supreme Court that assigns those cases contains a chief justice and four associate justices of its own. The state of Idaho does not have statistics on the individual levels of the court system, but the state does have statistics on the system as a whole. The Idaho state legal system sees over 500,000 cases annually. All of the state judges in Idaho are elected to six year