Wisconsin Supreme Court election: Schimel vs. Crawford
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
COLFAX — Voters in Wisconsin will have a chance April 1 to cast their ballot for a justice to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a 10-year term.
The two candidates on the ballot are Brad Schimel and Susan Crawford, which is the order their names will appear on the ballot.
Incumbent Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley is retiring.
Schimel, an attorney who served one term as Wisconsin attorney general and was elected as attorney general in November of 2014, served as the district attorney in Waukesha County from 2007 to 2015.
He was hired as an assistant district attorney in Waukesha County after graduating from law school in 1990 and was elected as Waukesha County district attorney in 2006.
Schimel also has served as an instructor at Waukesha County Technical College in the law enforcement and criminal justice department and at Concordia University Wisconsin as an adjunct professor.
While he was governor, Scott Walker appointed Schimel in 2019 as a Waukesha County circuit court judge.
When he was attorney general, Schimel was part of a 20-state lawsuit that tried to overturn the federal Affordable Care Act.
While serving as attorney general, Schimel is credited with obtaining about $7 million federal grants to handle a backlog of about 7,000 untested sexual assault kits.
Also while serving as attorney general, Schimel advocated for requiring abortion providers to secure admitting privileges to hospitals close by. A federal judge struck down the provision in 2013, which Schimel then appealed to the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals upheld the district court decision in November of 2015. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case when Schimel appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Josh Kaul, who is currently serving as Wisconsin’s attorney general, defeated Schimel in the November of 2018 election.
In the same election, Scott Walker lost to Democratic candidate Tony Evers.
Walker announced that he had appointed Schimel as a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge soon after the election.
Schimel was born in West Allis, graduated from Mukwonago High School, and in 1987, earned a bachelor’s degree from UW-Milwaukee, and obtained his Juris Doctor degree in 1990 from the UW Law School.
Crawford
Susan Crawford serves as a Dane County Circuit Court judge.
Crawford started out her career as an assistant attorney general in the Iowa Department of Justice and worked in the criminal justice appeals division, which often resulted in litigating cases before the Iowa Supreme Court.
She became an assistant attorney general for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, after being admitted to the Wisconsin Bar in 1997, and worked as the director of the appellate unit for criminal appeals under former attorney general Jim Doyle.
Crawford also has worked for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
After Jim Doyle was elected as governor of Wisconsin in 2003, Crawford was selected to be Governor Doyle’s chief legal counsel in 2009. Doyle served as governor until 2011.
Crawford then practiced law with the Madison firm Cullen Weston Pines & Bach, and her practice focused on voting rights and workers’ rights.
Crawford first ran for an open circuit court judgeship in Dane County in 2018, facing candidate Marilyn Townsend, who was a municipal judge for the village of Shorewood Hills.
Out of a little over 100,000 votes, Crawford won the election by about 4,000 votes and then ran unopposed for Dane County Circuit Court judge in 2024.
Crawford grew up in Chippewa Falls and graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1983.
She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, and after earning an undergraduate degree, earned a master’s degree from Indiana University. She then entered the University of Iowa College of Law and earned her Juris Doctor degree in 1994.
While in law school, Crawford served as the editor-in-chief of the Iowa Law Review.
