The Legal Business
of One Wisconsin County

Wisconsin made no attempt to collect information about the business of its courts before 1951, when the newly formed Judicial Council was charged with this task. Therefore, it is difficult to determine exactly how caseloads and the types of cases coming before the state's trial courts have changed over the years. However, in the late 1950s Francis Laurent and Willard Hurst of the U.W. Law School conducted a unique study of the Chippewa County courts from 1855 to 1954 to determine how one county's caseloads and legal business changed during the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. They analyzed and published the results in Laurent's book The Business of a Trial Court (1959).

Laurent and Hurst's study demonstrated that at least in Chippewa County, cases involving "the functioning of the market" consistently dominated the courts' business after statehood. Civil cases outnumbered criminal cases: Criminal cases averaged about 10-15 percent of the total caseload throughout the 19th century but increased to 25-30 percent of the caseload after 1920. Contract and real property cases have always been the largest category of civil cases, although with the rise of the industrial age and the automobile age, tort cases rose from less than 10 percent of the caseload in the 19th century to 20-25 percent in the 1940s. Major social changes had a direct effect on the courts' business: For example, overall litigation decreased significantly during World War I and World War II, and there was a burst of bank liquidation and reorganization cases during the Depression years of the 1930s.

Laurent and Hurst concluded that despite the direct relationship between economic and legal activity, "more striking is the relative absence from litigation of great areas of statute law which deal with the very framework of society." Once the constitutionality of the landmark regulatory systems and agencies created during the 20th century - for example, the worker's compensation system and the Industrial Commission during the Progressive era and the unemployment compensation system and economic relief laws of the 1930s - was established, they worked smoothly without need for extensive intervention and guidance from the courts.

Laurent and Hurst's study showed that the overall volume of cases in Chippewa County grew only modestly from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, after a period of steady and rapid expansion from 1855 to 1895. This pattern may not be typical of other Wisconsin counties or the state as a whole: Surveys of other counties done by the U.W. Law School in the 1930s and state statistics since the 1950s suggest that caseloads have grown steadily and rapidly from the 1930s to the present throughout most of the state. However, the same studies suggest that the mix of criminal and civil cases in Chippewa County is fairly typical of the state as a whole.