A closer look at the unopposed Court of Appeals candidate for District 2

By Alexandria Staubach
 
The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week struck Christine Hansen from the spring election for District 2 of the Court of Appeals, leaving Anthony LoCoco as the sole candidate on the ballot.
 
Hansen’s campaign website reports that she does not plan to challenge the WEC’s decision in court and is formally ending her campaign.
 
Now, none of the three Court of Appeals candidates up for election faces a challenger. But voters should still know a bit about them.
 
Judge Joe Donald is up for reelection in District 1, and Judge Rachel Graham is up for reelection in District 4. Both were initially appointed by the governor in 2019, so they are subjects of WJI’s “Evers’ judges” posts available here and here.
 
Because the District 2 race is for an open seat (Judge Lisa Neubauer is retiring), voters may not know much about the remaining candidate.
 
So who is Anthony LoCoco?
 
If the Waukesha resident’s work history is any indication, his election would result in a very conservative-minded court. Although LoCoco’s campaign website says he will “apply the law as written and never legislate from the bench,” he is simultaneously campaigning as a “proven conservative fighter who will keep our communities safe and the bureaucracy out of our lives.”
 
A Harvard Law School graduate, LoCoco served as a clerk for Justice Annette K. Ziegler.

Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley endorse LoCoco for the District 2 seat.
 
After the high-court clerking position, LoCoco became deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which was formed to address what it perceived as political imbalance where “conservatives and libertarians in Wisconsin were severely outnumbered in the legal arena.”
 
WILL’s founder and president, Rick Esenberg, wrote in 2023 that “changes in power mean changes in policy,” and “the so-called progressive left is committed not only to statist control of the economy, but to advancing the social objectives of the misnamed social justice warriors of the left.”
 
While at WILL, LoCoco participated in cases challenging the governor’s veto power (Bartlett v. Evers), demanding that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources hold a gray wolf hunt (Hunter Nation v. DNR), and involving Wisconsin’s legislative maps (Johnson v. WEC).
 
LoCoco subsequently was hired by the conservative think tank Institute for Reforming Government, for which former Gov. Scott Walker serves as honorary chair.
 
Most recently, LoCoco has managed his own “boutique appellate law firm,” Wisconsin Appellate Litigation Services.
 
LoCoco, like current District 2 Judges Maria Lazar and Shelly Grogan, is affiliated with the Federalist Society, which has described itself as a “group of conservatives and libertarians dedicated to reforming the current legal order.” According to his law firm website, LoCoco is vice president of the Federalist Society’s Milwaukee chapter.
 
Since a change in the law in 2011, litigants are no longer required to bring actions against the state in Dane County, and appeals of cases against the state in Dane County must be taken to a different appellate district—think Waukesha County in lieu of Dane County, and District 2 in lieu of District 4.
 
Today, cases involving the power struggle between the conservative Legislature and Gov. Evers’ executive branch often are appealed to District 2.