July 13, 2011

Wisconsin Supreme Court quote of the day

As to the court's latest unsigned order:
That Justice Roggensack participates in this motion for reconsideration is not a due process or ethical calculation but a mathematical one: one vote plus three votes equals an attempt to achieve a majority. — SSA, AWB, NPC, dissenting
Ouf.

State v. Dimitri Henley, 2011 WI 67:
Nor is the majority’s explication of Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., Inc. compelling. If due process were satisfied merely by the individual justice's ruling on recusal, then how could the U.S. Supreme Court have held that "due process requires recusal" because of the probability of that justice’s actual bias?
Bold added.

Maybe we'll find out. This unsigned order, unlike the court's previous unsigned order, presents questions of federal, constitutional law.

The protections of which, the dissenters argue, were not only denied but denied in favor of other, er, less legally substantive considerations.

"Strict construction," "textualism," "original intent," and all the rest of the conservative tropes pretty much fail when it comes to due process.

There's little guidance in the text of the Constitution as to what due process means and what little guidance there is must be gleaned from ancillary provisions. In such divinations conservatives tend to be every bit as lawless and unmoored from language as they accuse liberals of being.

Also:
[Troupis] has been helping Mike Gableman in his legal defense in an ethics investigation by the Office of Lawyer Regulation — an investigation for which Gableman could be disbarred.
Is this true?

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