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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Wisconsin / Joined 1981 / Served to 2007

Thomas Cane

Judge, Court of Appeals of Wisconsin

Thomas Cane was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Wisconsin, who joined the court in 1981. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1981–2007 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	Court of Appeals of Wisconsin	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cane authored 858 published opinions for the court (1981–2007), plus 28 dissents and 13 concurrences. Most cited: Sweet v. Berge (259 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. 433 of these were attributed to Cane 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
1983	Sweet v. Berge†	334 N.W.2d 559	259
2003	Turner v. Taylor	2003 WI App 256	162
1984	State v. Haseltine· Dissent†	352 N.W.2d 673	157
1984	Stoll v. Adriansen	362 N.W.2d 182	71
1984	State v. Wickstrom†	348 N.W.2d 183	69
2005	Patrick Fur Farm, Inc. v. United Vaccines, Inc.	2005 WI App 190	67
2001	State v. Nielsen	2001 WI App 192	61
1999	Dorr v. Sacred Heart Hospital	597 N.W.2d 462	58
1986	Northwestern National Insurance v. Nemetz†	400 N.W.2d 33	58
2003	Schonscheck v. Paccar, Inc.	2003 WI App 79	49
2000	State v. Leighton	2000 WI App 156	49
1997	State v. Anderson†	573 N.W.2d 872	49
1993	United States Fire Insurance v. Good Humor Corp.†	173 Wis. 2d 804	48
1996	State v. Elm†	549 N.W.2d 471	46
1994	State v. Greenwold†	525 N.W.2d 294	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 899 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 Court of Appeals of Wisconsin reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Thomas Cane on?: Thomas Cane was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Wisconsin.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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