How do judges of the Wisconsin Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Wisconsin Supreme Court / Joined 1964 / Served to 1995

Nathan S. Heffernan

Justice, Wisconsin Supreme Court

Nathan S. Heffernan was a Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1964. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1920–2007
Tenure: 1964–1995 · 31 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1964	Wisconsin Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Mount Mary University
Mount Mary University

Judicial Record

In our data, Heffernan authored 810 published opinions for the court (1964–1995), plus 64 dissents and 32 concurrences. Most cited: Anderson v. Continental Insurance (505 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 156 of these were attributed to Heffernan by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1978	Anderson v. Continental Insurance	271 N.W.2d 368	505
1971	McCleary v. State	182 N.W.2d 512	495
1986	State v. Bangert· Concurrence†	389 N.W.2d 12	406
1982	Loy v. Bunderson	320 N.W.2d 175	381
1985	State v. Dyess	370 N.W.2d 222	349
1981	Hartung v. Hartung	102 Wis. 2d 58	277
1984	Kremers-Urban Co. v. American Employers Insurance Co.	351 N.W.2d 156	237
1979	Morgan v. Pennsylvania General Insurance	275 N.W.2d 660	212
1990	Vollmer v. Luety	156 Wis. 2d 1	181
1977	First National Leasing Corp. v. City of Madison	260 N.W.2d 251	171
1974	A. E. Investment Corp. v. Link Builders, Inc.	214 N.W.2d 764	171
1980	State v. Rabe	291 N.W.2d 809	170
1980	Wurtz v. Fleischman	293 N.W.2d 155	169
1968	State v. Hutnik	159 N.W.2d 733	167
1975	Antoniewicz v. Reszczynski	236 N.W.2d 1	166

Showing the 15 most-cited of 906 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Wisconsin Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Nathan S. Heffernan on?: Nathan S. Heffernan was a Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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31 years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).