Gov. Tony Evers announced the state’s first settlement with a Marinette manufacturer of firefighting foam over alleged violations of the state’s spills law for failing to report PFAS contamination.
Wisconsin youth are appealing a recent decision to dismiss their legal challenge seeking to strike down state laws that they say worsen the climate crisis and violate their constitutional rights.
East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, voters stand in line at an early voting location in 2022. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has suspended Louisiana’s May 16, 2026, party primary elections for six U.S. House districts — after early voting had begun — following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the state’s existing congressional map. (Photo by Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator.)
When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas’ gerrymandered congressional map to take effect in December, its conservative majority wrote that a lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign” when it blocked the map more than three months before the election.
Now, the Supreme Court is the one upending elections.
For the past two decades, the Supreme Court has advanced the idea that federal courts should not order major changes close to an election to limit voter confusion. Over time the doctrine, first articulated in the 2006 case Purcell vs. Gonzalez, became known as the Purcell principle.
But election law experts and one of the court’s liberal justices say the Supreme Court is wielding — or disregarding — the principle unevenly in ways that aid Republicans.
In recent weeks, the Supreme Court has effectively allowed last-minute election changes in Southern states that hold major consequences for what districts voters are assigned to and the future of Black political representation across the region.
These Republican-controlled states are racing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate majority-Black districts, many of which have elected Black Democrats to Congress. The gerrymandering rush has come even with early voting underway in some states.
Wilfred Codrington III, a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, who has studied the Purcell principle, said limiting voter confusion is common sense. But after that general idea, the principle “just falls apart” because the Supreme Court has never answered questions raised by the doctrine — like how close to an election is too close.
“The court has not thought through them and it seems like when the court applies them, they’re being applied in partisan ways,” Codrington said, about questions the doctrine raises.
April ruling OK’d redistricting
After the high court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act in Callais, a landmark decision on April 29 that found Louisiana’s map unconstitutional, it fast-tracked paperwork so the state could quickly redraw district lines.
Voting had begun in the state’s congressional primary election, which Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended, discarding 42,000 votes already cast.
U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-Louisiana, testifies Friday, May 8, 2026, before the Louisiana Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee that considered proposals to update the state’s congressional districts. (Photo by Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)
A majority of the court voted to immediately certify its decision instead of observing its typical 32-day waiting period. In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the justices were disregarding their previous insistence that courts shouldn’t risk assuming political responsibility for a redistricting process that often produces hard feelings.
“There is also the so-called Purcell principle, which we invoked only five months ago to chide a federal district court for ‘improperly insert[ing] itself into an active primary campaign,’” Jackson wrote. “The Court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray. And just like that, those principles give way to power.”
The conservative justices on May 11 then cleared a path for Alabama to move toward implementing a Republican gerrymander that state lawmakers approved in 2023 but was blocked by a lower court. Their decision came a little more than a week before the state’s primary election.
Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has called an August special primary election for some of the state’s congressional districts.
“The United States Supreme Court’s decision is plain common sense and enables our values to be best represented in Congress,” Ivey said in a statement.
‘Like it doesn’t exist’
The Supreme Court’s actions this spring stand in stark contrast to its December decision to allow Texas’ gerrymander to take effect. After President Donald Trump urged GOP states to redraw their maps for partisan advantage, Texas was the first state to respond, enacting new lines that could help Republicans pick up five seats.
A three-judge district court panel ruled against the map, finding that it was racially gerrymandered. The Supreme Court paused the panel’s decision, finding that the panel likely made serious errors and that the district court was “causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections” amid the campaign season.
That language echoed the Purcell decision, which found that an appeals court had erred in blocking an Arizona law requiring a photo ID to register to vote. The Supreme Court’s unsigned opinion cautioned that court orders affecting elections can cause voter confusion.
“As an election draws closer, that risk will increase,” the 2006 opinion said.
Nearly 20 years later, the Supreme Court made no mention of Purcell in its Callais opinion, which dropped like a political bomb across the South. Since the decision, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee have either enacted new maps or are seeking to do so ahead of the November midterm elections.
Mark Johnson, a Kansas City-based lawyer with a long history of working on election litigation, noted that Callais was argued at the Supreme Court twice, first in March 2025 and again in October. The justices then waited a long time before releasing their decision, he said, adding that if they didn’t realize the implications of their ruling they were “asleep at the wheel.”
“That’s why the Callais case is so disturbing, because a Supreme Court that has by and large followed Purcell just acted like it doesn’t exist,” Johnson said.
The U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
Court legitimacy at stake
Several high-profile observers of the Supreme Court have been unsparing in their criticism of the justices’ approach.
Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and a foremost expert on the court, wrote in an online post that the court’s recent decisions “fatally undermine” the animating purpose of the Purcell principle.
“The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is. Either way, they don’t seem to mind the inconsistency—in a context in which it’s having the remarkably coincidental effect of benefiting Republicans,” Vladeck wrote.
Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote on social media that the Supreme Court in Chief Justice John Roberts’ hands “has become a chaos agent in elections.”
Public support for the Supreme Court was dropping prior to Callais. An August 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 48% of Americans hold a favorable view of the court, a 22-percentage point drop from August 2020.
In the wake of the decision, Democrats have renewed their calls for court reform. Some have proposed term limits for the justices or expanding the size of the court to dilute its conservative majority. However, major changes are unlikely to become law while the U.S. Senate retains the filibuster and Trump remains in office.
For his part, Roberts has taken pains to paint the court as outside of politics. But at a judicial conference in Pennsylvania in early May, Roberts acknowledged the public thinks the justices are expressing policy preferences rather than interpreting the law.
“I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do,” Roberts said, according to The Associated Press.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another of the court’s conservatives, has drawn a distinction between federal courts ordering last-minute changes to elections and states making changes themselves — suggesting that courts shouldn’t necessarily thwart state legislatures that alter rules and procedures in the run-up to elections.
In a 2020 concurring opinion about a federal judge who had altered Wisconsin’s absentee ballot deadline amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kavanaugh wrote that it was one thing for state legislatures to change their own election rules “in the late innings” and bear responsibility for unintended consequences.
“It is quite another thing for a federal district court to swoop in and alter carefully considered and democratically enacted state election rules when an election is imminent,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Chaotic campaign season
But voting rights advocates say Callais is unleashing a wave of voter confusion as Southern legislatures rush to gerrymander.
Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a map May 7 that divides the Memphis area among three congressional districts. The move splits a majority-Black district in Memphis represented by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat. Cohen announced Friday he wouldn’t seek reelection.
The state’s primary election is scheduled for Aug. 6.
A redrawn U.S. House district map shows Memphis split into three separate districts. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
“This is a year where we’re already in the cycle and they’re going to have to redo everything they’ve already worked on because these districts are completely different,” Matia Powell, executive director of the voting rights group Civic TN, told reporters.
The Tennessee Democratic Party and several Democratic candidates, including state Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for Cohen’s current seat, have filed a federal lawsuit against the map. They argue the new map will cause “significant voter confusion” and severely burden the right to vote.
Tennessee Republican Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argues the Democrats have a solution in search of a problem. Tennessee lawmakers have provided more than $3.1 million to implement the new map and that state officials are already working to meet election deadlines, Skrmetti’s office wrote in a Wednesday court filing.
“At bottom, this suit is an invitation to play politics, not law,” Tennessee Senior Assistant Attorney General Zachary Barker wrote in the filing.
U.S. District Court Judge William Campbell, a Trump appointee, on Thursday declined to immediately halt the map.
The Supreme Court has sent states the message that “there are no rules” and that state legislatures are welcome to gerrymander Black representation at any point, said Anna Baldwin, voting rights litigation director at Campaign Legal Center, which has sued over Florida’s recent gerrymander.
And the way the court applies the Purcell principle encourages states to make changes close to elections — because courts are more reluctant to block them.
“The court is creating a perverse incentive structure that ultimately does make it harder for people who are trying to protect voting rights to prevail,” Baldwin said.
Officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security say they are still working to deport Noel Quintana Gonzalez. The Madison restauranteur was released from immigration detention after the governor pardoned him for a 20-year-old cocaine conviction.
The two most common complaints I hear from people seeking public records are “Why is it taking so long?” and “Why does it cost so much?” Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to mount a successful legal challenge to delays or fees because of the way the state’s laws are worded.
Wisconsin’s Open Records Law imposes no deadline on producing records. All it says is they must be produced “as soon as practicable and without delay.” What does that actually mean? While the state Department of Justice recommends that simple requests receive a response within 10 business days, the DOJ itself doesn’t heed its own advice, often taking months — even years — to fulfill requests.
Courts haven’t given much guidance. They’ve essentially said it’s a reasonableness test that takes into account the size and complexity of the request, the resources of the government agency, and whether they are making a good faith effort to comply. But how long is too long?
Ideally, we’d have a deadline in our law, as some other states do. This may require prioritizing resources properly, which should already be happening. Fulfilling record requests, the law says, is “an essential function of a representative government and an integral part of the routine duties” of public officials.” And yet I’ve seen agencies with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars who have one person doing this work.
The other common problem with the records law is it allows custodians to charge fees for complying with records requests. Here, I am especially concerned about “location” fees. The government can charge for the “actual, necessary and direct cost” of finding records, typically at the hourly rate of the lowest-paid employee capable of searching. But sometimes this is still a considerable amount, and some custodians even want to charge for employees’ benefits.
Tom Kamenick
This amounts to, essentially, the government getting paid twice for the same work. Our taxes already pay the salary or wage of the employee searching for records. The requester pays them again.
Permitting location fees also incentivizes government agencies to be sloppy in their recordkeeping. The more disorganized their records are, the longer it will take them to find records, so the more money they can collect from requesters. Those high costs also discourage requesters from following through with requests.
For example, I’ve run into police departments that still store their personnel records in paper boxes, so if somebody wants, say, disciplinary records, the department can quote an often prohibitively high price to search each box for disciplinary files. Even if records are stored electronically, they can be hard to retrieve if they are not sensibly organized.
How can we fix these twin problems? If I were in charge (and I’m not), I’d put a strict deadline in the law and eliminate location fees altogether. But realistically, we are unlikely to see either reform.
Perhaps a more practical solution would be to tie the two problems together. Change the law so that custodians can charge location costs only if the records are produced within a strict deadline — perhaps 10 business days.
That compromise would incentivize better, more organized record keeping. Government agencies would now want to keep their records — especially those people frequently request — arranged in ways easy to search and easy to find. It would also incentivize them to devote enough resources to fulfill record requests promptly.
The result? Requesters will get records faster and cheaper, and government agencies might also see a net increase in revenue, as more requesters opt to pay for prompt service rather than walk away.
Pairing these two issues is an idea worth pursuing.
Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a group dedicated to open government. Tom Kamenick, a council member, is the president and founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project.
A new lawsuit filed by a watersports group argues an ordinance passed by a Wisconsin village is an illegal and unconstitutional ban on wake surfing and wake boats.
The Wauwatosa Police Department (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A Dane County Circuit Court judge ordered the Wisconsin Department of Justice to release its list of about 16,000 law enforcement officers certified in the state.
The lawsuit was brought by media outlets the Badger Project and Invisible Institute. Police officers in Wisconsin are required to be certified by the state’s Law Enforcement Standards Board. The DOJ has previously released partial versions of the list, arguing that the full database could compromise the identity of officers working undercover.
Both outlets have frequently written about “wandering cops” who leave departments due to misconduct or abuse only to be hired by another agency. The DOJ list includes a record of cops being fired or resigning in lieu of termination.
Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled on Tuesday that the DOJ’s argument against releasing the list went against the state’s open records law.
“When responding to records requests, there is a strong presumption of openness and liberal access to public records,” she wrote. “[T]he DOJ has not met its burden to show that this is an ‘exceptional case’ warranting nondisclosure.” The judge concluded that DOJ’s denial “was not the product of a genuine, case-by-case balancing analysis, but rather a habitual denial based on [its] past inability to garner compliance from local agencies.”
Lanford noted that law enforcement officers hold a public position and therefore “necessarily relinquish certain privacy and reputational rights by virtue of the amount of trust society places in them and must be subject to public scrutiny.”
Tom Kamenick, the lead attorney in the lawsuit and founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Institute, said the decision was a win for transparency in Wisconsin government and the requirement that officials must prove real risk of harm when denying an open records request.
“Courts have ruled time and time again that speculative fears of harm do not justify withholding government records from the public,” Kamenick said in a statement. “Government officials must do more than merely claim that, hypothetically, something bad might happen if the records are released. Rather, they must show that harm is likely to occur and is sufficiently serious to overcome the presumption of access to government records. DOJ could not do that here.”
Last week, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit against 5 different prediction market platforms alleging that they facilitate illegal sports betting in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is suing Kalshi, Robinhood, Coinbase, Polymarket and Crypto.com for allegedly illegally facilitating sports betting on their prediction market platforms, the state’s Department of Justice announced this week.
In an aerial photograph, migrants are seen grouped together while waiting to be processed on the Mexico side of the border across from El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2023. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court Friday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that disallowed immigrants claiming asylum at the southern border.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that immigration law allows those fleeing persecution to apply for asylum.
“Congress did not intend to grant the Executive the expansive removal authority it asserts,” Judge J. Michelle Childs wrote, adding that they upheld a lower court’s ruling.
The three panel judges who heard the case were Childs, Justin R. Walker and Cornelia T.L. Pillard. Walker, a Trump appointee, filed a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part from the majority.
Childs was appointed by former President Joe Biden and Pillard was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
“The (Immigration Nationality Act) does not allow the President to remove Plaintiffs under summary removal procedures of his own making,” according to the ruling. “Nor does it allow the Executive to suspend Plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum, deny Plaintiffs’ access to withholding of removal under the INA, or curtail mandatory procedures for adjudicating Plaintiffs’ Convention Against Torture claims.”
The White House did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.
“This decision puts an end to the inhumane Trump policy of sending people, including families with little children, back to horrific danger without even a hearing,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who argued the appeal, said in a statement. “The court made clear that the president does not have the unilateral power to wipe away all of the asylum laws enacted by Congress.”
One of Trump’s first executive orders suspended entry to the southern border on the grounds that there was an “invasion,” which the administration claimed was a condition that allowed the president to invoke a section of the law to suspend asylum claims.
The executive order is part of Trump’s immigration crackdown, as he aims to conduct mass deportations of immigrants in the interior and cease migration to the U.S. through curbing access to asylum and refugee resettlement.
In response to the order, immigration advocacy groups filed a class action lawsuit against the Trump administration. The groups who brought the suit were the ACLU, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
RAICES, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Florence Immigrant And Refugee Rights Project provide legal services to immigrants, and argued that Trump’s executive order harms the legal aid work of the individual plaintiffs.
A Wisconsin professional standard for social workers and other counselors bars conversion therapy, but two organizations are demanding its repeal after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Parade participants in England carry a "ban conversion therapy" banner. (Getty Images)
Two right-wing organizations are taking aim at the ban on conversion therapy in Wisconsin’s professional code for social workers, citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
But the head of a group that fought for the ban says professional standards are the central issue — and aren’t subject to free speech claims.
In a joint letter Wisconsin Family Action and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty are demanding that Wisconsin repeal the ban. Conversion therapy is awidely discredited practice purporting to change sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board included the ban in its updated professional code published in April 2024.
The code declares that it is “unprofessional conduct” for practitioners to use or promote “any intervention or method that has the purpose of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including attempting to change behaviors or expressions of self or to reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.”
Their letter seeking the conversion therapy ban’s repeal cites a U.S. Supreme Courtruling March 31 in a lawsuit that challenges Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy on First Amendment grounds.
The high court ruling didn’t throw out the Colorado law directly. Instead, it instructed the federal court hearing the Colorado lawsuit to subject that law to “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds because it seeks to “regulate speech based on viewpoint.”
The WILL-Wisconsin Family Action letter, first reported by Wisconsin Health News, was sent April 14 to Gov. Tony Evers, the Department of Safety and Professional Services and the chair of the social work examining board.
The letter demands that the board stop enforcing the ban and start the process of repealing it. WILL represents a Christian counselor in a pending federal lawsuit to block a La Crosse city ordinance that bans conversion therapy.
Marc Herstand, executive director for the National Association of Social Workers’ Wisconsin chapter, said the U.S. Supreme Court ruling isn’t relevant to the Wisconsin rule.
“I don’t think it applies because we have a rule, and according to state statute, professional boards can create their own ethical standards,” Herstand told the Wisconsin Examiner. That is supported by both the general law that applies to the state’s licensing boards as well as specific provisions authorizing the social worker board, he said.
Herstand said rules against conversion therapy are toprevent harm. He compared the practice to an electrician’s bad advice that leads to a homeowner’s fatal electric shock or a health provider whose bad advice leads a patient with diabetes to lose a limb to nerve damage or the loss of circulation.
“That’s not free speech — that’s unprofessional conduct,” Herstand said. The electrician or health professional “would be held accountable by the [relevant professional] board. Conversion therapy is exactly the same thing.”
Republican lawmakers repeatedlyblocked several previous attempts to update Wisconsin’s social work standards. In April 2024, after the Legislature’s session ended, the social work examining board updated its professional standards to restore the conversion therapy ban.
Then, in a landmark state Supreme Courtruling in July 2025, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky wrote that the statutes that state legislators had used to review and suspend administrative rules violated the Wisconsin Constitution. The examining board “exercised its statutory authority” when it revised its rules to ban conversion therapy, Karofsky wrote in the 4-3 decision.
Legislative Republicans are asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed earlier this year by parents and educators from across Wisconsin alleging lawmakers have failed to adequately fund public schools.
The Pabst Brewing Company can be held liable for injuries that an independent contractor suffered on the job, and may pay out damages, after a decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court Wednesday.
Defense attorneys are calling for sanctions against the Kenosha County district attorney over actions in an ongoing homicide trial. A judge called the DA's actions "extremely unacceptable."
The historic Pabst Brewery operated in Milwaukee from 1844 until it closed in 1996. (Photo by Joe Hendrickson/Getty Images Plus)
Wisconsin’s highest court ruled Wednesday that Pabst Brewing Co. owes millions in damages to the survivors of a worker employed by a second company who died from a cancer related to asbestos in the Pabst brewery in Milwaukee.
The deceased employee — a steamfitter hired to remove asbestos insulation from piping in the facility — worked for an independent contractor, not directly for Pabst.
But Pabst was sufficiently aware of the dangers of asbestos on its premises to be held responsible under Wisconsin’s workplace safety law, known as the safe place statute, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet wrote in the 5-2 decision. The ruling upheld the circuit court’s award of nearly $7 million to the estate of steamfitter Gerald Lorbiecki.
“As the owner of the brewery, Pabst owed a non-delegable duty under the safe-place statute to frequenters on the premises, a category that includes employees of independent contractors like Lorbiecki,” wrote Dallet. She was joined by Chief Justice Jill Karofsky and Justices Brian Hagedorn, Janet Protasiewicz and Susan Crawford.
Lawyers for Pabst had argued that the brewery wasn’t responsible for the hazard because Lorbiecki’s employer had directed the work, not Pabst. In a dissent, Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley agreed, writing that the Court majority “fails to correctly analyze the law regarding a building owner’s liability to an independent contractor’s employee.”
The asbestos only became a hazard because of the work that Lorbiecki and his coworkers were doing, Ziegler argued.
The repair work took place during the mid-1970s, according to the ruling. “At the Pabst brewery, steamfitters cut out existing insulated pipes and replaced them,” Dallet wrote — a procedure that involved “thousands of pounds of insulation” that would be torn off “many miles” of asbestos-insulated pipe, according to circuit court testimony. The brewery closed in 1996.
Lorbiecki developed mesothelioma in 2017 and sued Pabst and several other contractors and businesses. After he died his widow and his estate took over as the plaintiffs. His widow later died and their son assumed that role.
By the time the case went to trial, claims against the other companies, including Lorbiecki’s employer, had been dismissed, leaving only Pabst.
Pabst asked the lower court to throw out the case on several grounds, including that Lorbiecki worked for an independent contractor rather than Pabst.
The judge denied the company’s summary judgment petition. The jury awarded $6.5 million for Lorbiecki’s injuries and illness. Jurors also awarded $20 million in punitive damages.
Under state law, a portion of the compensatory damages were capped. State law also caps punitive damages at twice the amount of compensatory damages.
After calculating that Pabst was responsible for 42% of the compensatory damages, the judge calculated the total award at $6,986,906, including $4,657,937 in punitive damages.
The Wisconsin 2nd District Appeals Court in Milwaukee held in a May 2024 decision that the punitive damages should be calculated based on the total amount of compensatory damages — $5.5 million — not just the portion applied to Pabst. That would result in punitive damages of more than $11 million.
The Supreme Court ruling Wednesday reversed that portion of the appeals court ruling, however. Punitive damages in the case should reflect only Pabst’s portion of the compensatory damages — $2.3 million — Dallet wrote, yielding the punitive damages as the lower court originally calculated them.