Browsing: Courts

Meet Daniel Kelly, the most improbable candidate to land a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
A Colorado boy, Kelly did not grow up in Wisconsin. He didn’t attend either of the state’s two law schools, the legal factories that stamp out most of the top judges in Wisconsin. In the two decades that Kelly worked as a lawyer in the Badger State, it was largely out of the public spotlight on complex commercial litigation.
And when his name surfaced last year as one of three finalists to replace retiring Justice David Prosser, Kelly was excoriated as an extremist by lefties horrified at the high court’s rightward tilt. He was far from the odds-on favorite to earn the governor’s appointment.

Several years ago while sitting at my desk I received a curious phone call from a Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreporter working on a story about convicted felons working as lobbyists in Madison. 

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the annual dinner of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute in…

In April, David Prosser was re-elected to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court after a campaign in which…

Using bitingly personal language, the seven justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court spent much of the current term arguing over,…