Brian Hagedorn
Hagedorn in 2023
Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court
Incumbent
Assumed office August 1, 2019
Preceded by	Shirley Abrahamson
Judge of theWisconsin Court of Appeals District II
In office August 1, 2015 – July 31, 2019
Appointed by	Scott Walker
Preceded by	Richard S. Brown
Succeeded by	Jeffrey O. Davis
Personal details
Born	(1978-01-21)January 21, 1978 (age 47) Brookfield, Wisconsin, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Christina[1] (divorced 2023)[2]
Children	5[3]
Education	Trinity International University (BA) Northwestern University (JD)

Brian Keith Hagedorn (born January 21, 1978)^[4] is an American lawyer and a justice of theWisconsin Supreme Court, serving since 2019. Before his election to the Supreme Court, he served four years as a judge on theWisconsin Court of Appeals.

AMilwaukee native, Hagedorn graduated fromTrinity International University in 2000 and was employed byHewitt Associates before receiving hisJ.D. degree fromNorthwestern University in 2006.^[5] At Northwestern, Hagedorn was president of the school'sFederalist Society chapter.^[6]

Hagedorn was an attorney at the Milwaukee firmFoley & Lardner until 2009 when he was appointed as a law clerk toWisconsin Supreme Court JusticeMichael Gableman.^[5] In 2010, Hagedorn was employed as an assistant attorney general in theWisconsin Department of Justice, underAttorney GeneralJ. B. Van Hollen.^[5][7]

In December 2010, Hagedorn was appointed chief legal counsel to theRepublican governor-electScott Walker. He remained in that office through July 2015. As chief legal counsel, Hagedorn was a drafter of Walker's controversialWisconsin Budget Repair Bill of 2011,^[5] and, in 2014, he served as appointing authority for the defense counsel hired to represent state prosecutors sued by targets of a John Doe probe into Walker's staff.^[8]

On July 30, 2015, Walker appointed Hagedorn to theWisconsin Court of Appeals to be chambered in theWaukesha-based District II. Hagedorn took office on August 1 2015, and replaced retiring Chief JudgeRichard S. Brown, who had served on the Court of Appeals since it was created in 1978.^[6]

In 2019, Hagedorn ran for a seat on theWisconsin Supreme Court to succeed retiring JusticeShirley Abrahamson, who had served on the court since 1976. His opponent in the election wasLisa Neubauer, Chief Judge of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.

Based on unofficial results in the nonpartisan general election, Hagedorn originally led by 5,962 votes out of 1.2 million cast, a margin of about 0.5%, with a post-election canvas increasing his lead slightly to around 6,100 votes. Under state law, Neubauer could have requested a recount, but she would have had to fund the recount herself because the difference was greater than 0.25%, which is the margin that triggers a taxpayer-funded recount.^[9][10] Instead, Neubauer conceded to Hagedorn.^[11]

Hagedorn was inaugurated on August 1, 2019.^[12] After several of his early decisions went contrary to the conservative majority of the court, theAssociated Press theorized that Hagedorn could become aswing vote on the Court after the inauguration of liberal justiceJill Karofsky in August 2020.^[13] That analysis was borne out throughout 2020, as Hagedorn's vote was decisive on politically sensitive cases on theCOVID-19 pandemic in Wisconsin and election-related cases before and after the2020 election. He has since come under criticism from his former Supreme Court colleague, conservative justiceDaniel Kelly, who accused Hagedorn of trying to seek political neutrality when considering the implications of his rulings.^[14] Hagedorn remained considered the swing vote until the court shifted from a conservative majority to a liberal majority after the2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.^[15] Hagedorn has been described asright-leaning justice, less strictly aligned with the court's conservative wing than the court's conservatives.^[16]

In a case involving attempts by conservative groups to force the stateElections Commission topurge more than 230,000 voters from the activevoter rolls, Hagedorn sided with the liberal justices' position that the Court should not review a lower court's opinion which had halted the purge. Hagedorn's decision resulted in a 3–3 tie on the Court, due to Justice Daniel Kelly's recusal, leaving the lower court ruling in place.^[17]

In May 2020, Hagedorn dissented from the conservative majority's decision to invalidate GovernorTony Evers'stay-at-home orderamid of theCOVID-19 pandemic in the United States. He wrote of the majority opinion, "We are not here to do freewheeling constitutional theory. We are not here to step in and referee every intractable political stalemate. In striking down most of (the order), this court has strayed from its charge and turned this case into something quite different than the case brought to us." Conservatives, including outgoing justice Daniel Kelly, subsequently expressed disappointment with Hagedorn.^[13]

In November 2020, while COVID-19 cases were surging in Wisconsin, he was in the Wisconsin Supreme Court's conservative majority that prevented the City of Racine Public Health Department form ordering school closures.^[18] In March 2021, Hagedorn was in the Wisconsin Supreme Court's conservative majority that prevented Governor Tony Evers from extending a face mask mandate intended to halt the spread of the Coronavirus.^[19]

In the lead-up to the mailing ofabsentee ballots for the2020 election, Hagedorn again sided with the three liberal justices in a critical case keeping theGreen Party candidates,Howie Hawkins andAngela Nicole Walker, off of the 2020 ballot in Wisconsin. The Green Party had missed several deadlines to file corrections and responses to errors with their nominating papers, leaving theWisconsin Elections Commission unable to add the Greens to the ballot.^[20]

Just days before ballots were due to be sent out, however, the Greens sued for ballot access with the assistance of several Republican lawyers, and the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court took up their case, forcing a statewide pause in the printing and mailing of ballots.^[21] This appeared to be part of a larger Republican effort—along with their propping up of theKanye West presidential campaign and thesabotage of the U.S. Postal Service—to dilute the anti-Trump vote and disrupt absentee voting.^[22]

Hagedorn's decision to side with the liberal justices allowed the state to avoid the logistical difficulty that would have resulted from having to re-design and re-print more than a million ballots, which would have all but guaranteed that county clerks would have missed the deadline to send the ballots to voters.^[20]

Following the2020 United States presidential election, the defeated incumbent, PresidentDonald Trump, launched severallawsuits in several states where the official vote tally showed his opponentJoe Biden as the victor. On December 1, 2020, coinciding with the Governor's certification of Wisconsin's election results—showing Biden as the victor by about 20,000 votes—President Trump's legal team petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf to throw out hundreds of thousands of those votes.^[23][24]

On December 3, 2020, Justice Hagedorn again sided with the court's liberal minority, voting to reject the petition from President Trump's campaign on the procedural error that, according to Wisconsin law, any election challenges must originate in the Wisconsin Circuit Courts. Justice Hagedorn said of his decision, "We do well as a judicial body to abide by time-tested judicial norms, even—and maybe especially—in high-profile cases."^[25][26]

In 2021, the Wisconsin Legislature and governor failed to agree on newredistricting maps to account for the2020 United States census, so the issue fell to the courts, as had happened in 1982, 1992, and 2002. In those previous examples, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had deferred to panels of federal judges, as the federal courts had established tests and procedure for dealing with redistricting cases. The Wisconsin Supreme Court had only drawn legislative maps once in their history, in 1964, and that decision predated many of the federal laws which now govern redistricting.^{[citation needed]}

Wisconsin Republicans were adamant that the state court should keep the case this time, as they believed they had a greater partisan advantage with the 4–3 conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Conservatives on the court, including Hagedorn, obliged the partisan request and assumed original jurisdiction onJohnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, taking on a redistricting case for the first time in nearly 60 years.^{[citation needed]}

The conservative majority on the court then devised a novel test for how they would evaluate map proposals, declaring that they would look to make the "least changes" necessary to the existing maps to reflect the population changes in the 2020 census. Choosing this test alone conferred a distinct and obvious partisan advantage to the Republican Party since the existing maps had been intentionally designed in 2011 to give a partisan advantage to Republican candidates.^[27][28] However, after map proposals had been submitted by the Republican legislature and the Democratic governor, it was found that the governor's map proposal more closely adhered to the court's "least changes" guidance. Hagedorn broke from the conservative majority and sided with the court's three liberals to select GovernorTony Evers maps in March 2022, but that decision was immediately challenged by theUnited States Supreme Court.^[29] The U.S. Supreme Court, in ashadow docket opinion, reversed the Wisconsin Supreme Court on their legislative maps, finding that the state supreme court had adopted a defective process in their redistricting efforts. A short time later, Hagedorn rejoined the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select the Republican maps.^[30] The 2022 map was even more lopsided to Republican partisan advantage than their 2011 plan, and under the 2022 map, the Republicans achieved a super-majority in the Wisconsin Senate.^[30]

In 2023, however, the2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election flipped the majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from conservative to liberal, and Democratic-aligned interest groups vowed to revisit the question of redistricting. As expected, the new court majority took up a new redistricting case in 2023, examining a technical question about whether the maps violated the State Constitution's requirement that districts be composed of "contiguous territory". In a 4–3 decision along ideological lines, the liberal majority ruled inClarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission that the maps did violate the Constitution and would need to be entirely redrawn. Hagedorn dissented, writing that the state court lacked proper tests and procedures to handle redistricting cases; he also lamented that the court would now be tainted by recurring partisan battles over redistricting.^[31] His dissent inClarke represented a significant shift in his opinion from his vote in 2022 to assume jurisdiction over theJohnson redistricting case.

In the mid-2000s, while Hagedorn was in law school, he argued that the Supreme Court ruling that found that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional could lead to legalized bestiality (citing the dissent of JusticeAntonin Scalia). In an October 2005 blog post that criticized the Supreme Court's decision inLawrence v. Texas, he stated that "..render[ing] laws prohibiting bestiality unconstitutional [because] the idea of homosexual behavior is different than bestiality as a constitutional matter is unjustifiable".^[32] He also argued thatgay pride month created "a hostile work environment for Christians."^[32]

Hagedorn was paid more than $3,000 to give speeches between 2015 and 2017 toAlliance Defending Freedom.^[33][34] In 2004, as a law student, Hagedorn was an intern for the group, then known as the Alliance Defense Fund.^[34]

In 2016, Hagedorn founded the Augustine Academy inMerton, Wisconsin, a private K-6Christian school.^[35] The school's code of conduct bars teachers, parents and students from "participating in immoral sexual activity", which is defined as any form of touching or nudity to evoke sexual arousal apart from the context of marriage between one man and one woman.^[35] Teachers who violate the policy can be dismissed and students can be expelled for their or their parents' actions.^[35] The school's "Statement of Faith" states that "Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women," and "..., men and women are not simply interchangeable, nor is gender subject to one's personal preferences."^[35] In February 2019, following newspaper reports about these policies, the Wisconsin Realtors Association withdrew its support for Hagedorn and asked him to return an $18,000 donation made to him in January 2019 towards his campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.^[32]

• Brian Hagedorn at Wisconsin Vote
• Profile atVote Smart
• Brian Hagedorn atBallotpedia
• The Augustine Academy

• Justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court
• Lawyers from Milwaukee
• Living people
• Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law alumni
• Trinity International University alumni
• Wisconsin Court of Appeals judges
• 1978 births

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