Justice Roggensack Reelected

Justice Pat Roggensack has won another ten year term on the state Supreme Court. She defeated her challenger Marquette Universitylaw professor Ed Fallone by a comfortable margin of more than 100,000 votes.

Roggensack says her victory indicatesthat voters want an experienced judge on the bench, not a lawyer like Fallone who has never served as a judge. Falloneteaches constitutional and corporate law at Marquette. Hetried and failed to convince voters that he could solve thepartisan bickering on the court that he says has caused the public to lose faith in its ability to decide cases fairly. Roggensack acknowledged there are problems and promisedshe’ll work to resolve the ethics charges against fellow Justice David Prosser. Those charges stem from a physical altercation between Prosser and Justice Anne Walsh Bradley in 2011.

“There’s repair work that needs to be done and so we will get to it. I will keep after getting it done, I promise you,” she said.

In his concession speech, Ed Fallone continued to urge the court to do just that.

“I hope with today’s election the court will begin to heal those divisions moving past their disputes and restoring our supreme court to a position of respect in the eyes of the public,” he said.

Fallone had also called for tighter rules requiring judges to step down from cases involving parties who have made large campaign contributions. Roggensack saysthat decision will remain one each judge will make for him or herself.

“I don’t expect there’ll be anything else. I thank that’s well settled. and I don’t anticipate anything further there,” she said.

Roggensack says her main priority now isimproving the efficiency of the court byspeeding up the process for writing and releasing opinions and lookingfor ways the court can reach out to the public more and publicize the work it does interpreting the laws of the state.