Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar speaks at a Feb. 17 forum at the Marquette University law school. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Maria Lazar says she wants disagreements on the Court to be more respectful. 

At a Tuesday forum hosted by the Marquette University School of Law, Lazar attempted to distance herself from the highly politicized Supreme Court campaigns of recent years, painting herself as an independent judge who, while leaning more conservative than the Court’s current liberal majority, wants to just follow the law. 

However, since her election to the state’s District Two Court of Appeals, Lazar has been a reliably conservative vote on the reliably conservative appellate panel — including a case in which she sided with election deniers attempting to gain access to confidential voter information. Lazar’s campaign has also received endorsements and financial support from high profile Republicans. 

But she says she’s never been a member of a political party, contrasting herself with her opponent, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who was previously a Democratic member of the state Assembly. State Supreme Court races are nominally nonpartisan, but both political parties have been heavily involved in supporting their preferred candidates in recent years.  

“I am the one on my court that sort of solves the disputes, and I think that on the Supreme Court I would be the same way,” she said. “I know that it would be 3-4, and I know that I’d be in the minority with the more conservative leaning than liberal leaning, and I get that. But the decisions aren’t all 4-to-3. I mean, sometimes they’re 7-0 or 6-1, and I just think that I would bring a level of collegiality, a level of really hard dedication and work.” 

Since the liberal wing of the Court gained the majority with the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz in 2023, the Court’s conservatives — most notably Justice Annette Ziegler and the outgoing Justice Rebecca Bradley — have frequently lobbed personal attacks at the majority in their published opinions, accusing the majority of being partisan lackeys for the Democratic party. 

Lazar said she doesn’t think the Court should work that way. 

“But some of the opinions written by our Court right now, the differences that are going on on that bench, there’s such a level of dissatisfaction with each other and personal animus that when you read those dissents, you say, how can you write something that personal and mean and then go and work the next day and sit across from that person and say, ‘Let’s talk about the next appeal?’” she said. 

Despite her efforts to paint herself as a moderate, Lazar has occasionally shared her agreement with conservative beliefs on abortion. As an attorney for the state Department of Justice under Gov. Scott Walker, Lazar defended Act 10, the law that repealed labor rights for public employees, and argued in favor of gerrymandered maps Republicans drew in 2011, locking in disproportionate GOP legislative majorities. 

“I would never be on that Court to be a firebrand,” Lazar said Tuesday. “I would be on that Court to stand up for what I believe in and what I believe the law says.” 

At the forum, Lazar said she can’t share with voters how she would decide hypothetical cases, but she can share “what I believe in and what I stand for.” The remark closely mirrors statements Protasiewicz made about her political beliefs during her 2023 campaign. Those remarks have followed Protasiewicz onto the bench, with Republicans often raising them to demand that she recuse herself from controversial cases. 

On her judicial philosophy, Lazar said she’s “an originalist with a slight tinge of textualism.” 

Originalism is a legal theory that emerged in the 1980s and has become the dominant ideology of conservative justices across the country. Under the theory, judges argue that laws should be interpreted through the intent and context of the law when it was written — attempting to glean the motivations of the country’s constitutional framers 250 years after the fact. Critics argue that originalists often use flawed historical analysis. 

But at the forum, Lazar gave a different meaning to originalism. 

“Originalist means that if you get the statute or the law or the constitutional amendment or whatever it is, you look at it first, and if you can’t answer the question, which you probably can’t, because why is it in front of your court if it’s so obvious? So you look at it, and then you look at headings. You look at statutes around it, you look at other statutes in the law. You start looking around. And that’s originalism. You’re looking at the words as they’re written,” she said. 

Lazar said that trying to determine the intent of legislators gets dangerous. 

“Now, some judicial philosophies go all the way out. And they look at everything, what people say when they write the laws, what their intent was, and that’s a little dangerous,” she said. “To me, that’s judicial activism, because I see judges and justices who get to the end result in their mind and then find a way to get there. That’s not the proper way to look at the law, and that’s not what we do. We don’t legislate on the bench. We’re not activists. We don’t have agendas.”