Dozens urge high court to take up proposal to change judicial recusal rules

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A little more than a month after removing the proposal from its agenda, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will consider  taking up a request by 54 retired judges asking the court to consider adopting what they deem an objective standard for judicial recusals.

The justices will be meeting in open conference at 9:30 a.m. Thursday in the state Capitol’s Supreme Court Hearing Room.

Among the petitions up for discussion is a request by dozens of retired judges asking the court to adopt an objective standard governing when judges must recuse themselves and to create maximum dollar limits on the campaign contributions that judges may accept from a party in a matter pending before them.

The proposal would modify recusal rules that the justices adopted in 2010. Those rules were shaped by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which submitted a petition in 2008 calling for the justices to change the judicial code so that receiving a campaign contribution did not automatically require judges to recuse themselves from cases. The justices adopted that petition in a 4-3 vote.

The court has received more than 60 letters from private citizens and several organizations have weighed in, including the Wisconsin Bankers Association, the Wisconsin Democracy campaign, the ACLU of Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause in Wisconsin and One Wisconsin Now.

So far, the only opposition to the proposal has come from the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the banker’s association, a Germantown resident and a group of 11 retired judges including former Supreme Court Justices Louis Ceci Jon Wilcox.

WILL, the 11 retired judges and the bankers association contend the proposal infringes on First Amendment rights to free speech by restricting the amount of contributions that can be made to judicial candidates.

The justices had been scheduled to discuss whether to take up the current petition on March 16 but later bumped it off the agenda days before the conference.

The morning of March 14, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had sent an email asking the justices to remove the proposal from the calendar two days later and give it time to file an explanation of its opposition to the proposal.

According to the emails WILL exchanged with the high court’s staff the morning before the agenda was revised, Chief Justice Pat Roggensack had intended to remove the proposal from the agenda before WILL had submitted its email.

The court on Thursday will also be deciding whether to take up proposals to bring the state’s class-action statute up to date so that it mirrors the federal rule, to modify the state’s reciprocity rules so that tribal attorneys licensed in other states can be waived from taking the bar examination and changing rules governing judicial education.