Former Chief Justice Ziegler is outraged by changes to Supreme Court's internal operating procedures

By Alexandria Staubach

Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler says the Supreme Court of Wisconsin has abandoned two-year-old internal operating procedures that took power from the chief justice and gave more decision-making authority to an administrative committee controlled by the court's majority.

Ziegler discussed the recent procedural changes in her dissent to a July 2025 decision declining to establish a permanent specialty court for complex business litigation.

“The public will not know what occurred behind closed doors for this about-face to take place,” said Ziegler about the changes in procedure, which occurred since Ziegler was replaced as chief justice.

Wisconsin Watch in 2023 published the heated emails exchanged between justices when the majority formed by Justices Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet, Jill Karofsky, and Janet Protasiewicz changed internal operating procedures shortly after Protasiewicz took her seat on the court. The changes took power away from the chief justice—at that time Ziegler.

Ziegler served two two-year terms as chief justice, from 2021-2025. This spring, the same majority that changed the rules in 2023 voted in two new chief justices, first Walsh Bradley, whose term on the court expired at the end of July, and now Karofsky. 

Ziegler was the only chief justice to deal with the more liberal majority’s internal operating procedures. 

Ziegler complained in her dissent that "these four justices embrace process when it is convenient and disregard process when it is not." Back in 2023, she said, "(t)he 'court of four,' unlike any majority in history, ensured that it would completely control what had always been understood as the constitutional authority of the chief justice."

Ziegler wrote in her dissent that “almost immediately" after her ouster as chief, the court “reverted to the original practices and procedures that had been in place for over four decades.” The “nearly two-year-old changes to our administrative practices and procedures relating to the constitutional role of the chief justice were undone.”

Ziegler called the about-face “the exercise of sheer will to undo the constitutional role of the chief justice, when convenient, and reinstate it, when opportune,” calling it a “power grab” and “complete disregard for process.”

As for the matter of the business courts, Ziegler criticized the court’s decision to terminate the nearly decade-old pilot project for specialty business courts. She said the decision to end the business court project was a disservice to the memory and work of former Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, who led the court from 2015 to 2019. “The majority does this without any regard to the fact that former Chief Justice Roggensack viewed this initiative as of upmost importance.”

Ziegler did not acknowledge in her opinion that conservatives also have a history of changing court procedure when it suits them. Ten years ago, Republicans used a constitutional amendment to replace the 126-year-old practice of the longest-serving justice serving as chief. At the time, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson was the longest-serving chief justice in the state’s history, having taken the helm in 1996. Some felt then that conservatives were attacking the liberal Abrahamson. 

A campaign backed by $600,000 from the state’s largest business group resulted in passage by voters in April 2015 of a constitutional amendment allowing the justices to vote for chief justice.

Abrahamson sued over the amendment but lost. 

Roggensack became chief on May 1, 2015, having been voted in shortly after the amendment passed.

When the new majority of justices in August 2023 passed internal operating procedures to take away certain powers of the chief justice, Dallet said in a statement that they “were primarily made to ensure that any one person could not hold up the work of the entire court.”

The statement came at the opening of the court’s 2023-2024 term, during which the court issued a record low of 14 opinions. 

The court’s productivity is up, with 23 cases decided in the 2024-2025 term. However, the numbers still lag behind the average of 50 decision cases in the previous decade, according to a report from University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative.