"The Wisconsin Supreme Court is quite vigorously asserting itself against the other branches of state government."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has excerpts from a speech by 7th Circuit Judge Diane Sykes, complaining about the Wisconsin Supreme Court (where she was once a justice):

In a series of landmark decisions [in the past year], the court:

• Rewrote the rational basis test for evaluating challenges to state statutes under the Wisconsin Constitution, striking down the statutory limit on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases;

• Eliminated the individual causation requirement for tort liability in lawsuits against manufacturers of lead-paint pigment, expanding "risk contribution" theory, a form of collective industry liability;

• Expanded the scope of the exclusionary rule under the state constitution to require suppression of physical evidence obtained as a result of law enforcement's failure to administer Miranda warnings;

• Declared a common police identification procedure inherently suggestive and the resulting identification evidence generally inadmissible in criminal prosecutions under the state constitution's due process clause;

• Invoked the court's supervisory authority over the state court system to impose a new rule on law enforcement that all juvenile custodial interrogations be electronically recorded....

The terms "modesty" and "restraint"- the watchwords of today's judicial mainstream - seem to be missing from the Wisconsin Supreme Court's current vocabulary. Instead, the court has adopted a more aggressive approach to judging.