Wisconsin Supreme Court Election: Republicans Hope to Flip Court

When traditional conservative judicial candidates make their pitch to voters, one crucial jurisprudential dictum typically tops everything else: Judges don’t make law; legislatures do.

This conservative principle is at stake in this spring’s Wisconsin supreme court election, argues conservative nominee Brad Schimel, the Badger State’s former attorney general who now serves as a circuit court judge in Waukesha County. “Judges should faithfully apply the law the way the legislature wrote it to the facts of a case,” he told National Review in a wide-ranging interview about his candidacy. “We shouldn’t decide what’s good policy and what’s bad policy. “The legislature is, frankly, free to write bad laws if they want to. Judges don’t get to interfere with that.”

About the Author

Audrey Fahlberg

Audrey Fahlberg was a politics reporter for National Review.

When traditional conservative judicial candidates make their pitch to voters, one crucial jurisprudential dictum typically tops everything else: Judges don’t make law; legislatures do.

This conservative principle is at stake in this spring’s Wisconsin supreme court election, argues conservative nominee Brad Schimel, the Badger State’s former attorney general who now serves as a circuit court judge in Waukesha County. “Judges should faithfully apply the law the way the legislature wrote it to the facts of a case,” he told National Review in a wide-ranging interview about his candidacy. “We shouldn’t decide what’s good policy and what’s bad policy. “The legislature is, frankly, free to write bad laws if they want to. Judges don’t get to interfere with that.”