Abrahamson pioneer in activist "new Federalism"

Shirley Abrahamson, nationally renowned Activist vs Randy Koschnick in the Wisconsin Supreme court race ...more evidence, now from the major media! Finally some actual investigative reporting with facts and everything....

Quotes in a recent article by Patrick McIlheran entitled "Who knew? Abrahamson remodels law" Posted: Mar. 26, 2009 jsonline.com

"That ad says Abrahamson has a national reputation; what it doesn't say is that it's a reputation for a progressive take on the law. When a U.S. Supreme Court spot opened in 1993, President Bill Clinton short-listed Abrahamson - but eventually opted for moderation by going with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the U.S. Supreme Court's present left wingtip."

"When her challenger, the bright and capable Jefferson County Circuit Judge Randy Koschnick, calls her an activist, she pleads that most of her cases are incontrovertible. True, of most Supreme Court decisions. It's the few close ones that shake things up. Abrahamson has some dandies, especially from 2005, her rare moment in the majority.That's when, for instance, she tossed out the Legislature's limits on malpractice jackpots against doctors. Usually, courts have to defer to lawmakers' judgments on policy, as long as they're rational. Abrahamson redefined the test of rationality so as to gain a free hand."

" That idea that even if the U.S. Supreme Court says no, a state court can finagle a yes is called "new Federalism...Abrahamson's a big name in it"

"...sympathy in hard cases is a good way to get bad law. Abrahamson needs to remember she's not a TV judge dispensing satisfactory endings. She's fiddling with the law."

"For years, Abrahamson's been writing that legal principle and reason sometimes just won't do. "A judge must judge different people differently," she once wrote, and elsewhere, she wrote that female judges "should make a special effort to understand other outsiders - the poor, the differently abled, . . . minorities." "

"Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson says she just can't grasp why critics call her an activist judge. "I don't know what these labels mean," she told editors and reporters recently.
If she actually believed that, I'd doubt her legendary intelligence. Law school professors, appeals court judges and colleagues of Abrahamson have in crystalline detail fleshed out the meaning: Activists stretch the law and the limits of courts' power to reach a desired result."


Full article here:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/41942497.html