Browsing: Courts

The current system is vulnerable to politics and perverse incentives

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.

On Aug. 12, 2015, Christina Traub’s boyfriend forced her to the ground and put his hands around her neck. On a Madison street in broad daylight, he slammed her head against the sidewalk and strangled her, his thumbs over her throat.

Twenty-two states provide for election of the chief justice by the court, and none seem to have faced the divisiveness that Wisconsin has experienced.

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. 

Ed Fallone’s failed Supreme Court challenge will mean continued conservative dominance By RICHARD ESENBERG So what are we to make…

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…

As both ideological and deeply personal disputes become increasingly public, the court’s members are issuing fewer opinions than any other Wisconsin Supreme Court in decades