The summer 2026 issue of the Marquette Lawyer magazine has a number of entries concerning the Hon. Diane S. Sykes, L’84, including a set of one-page essays by seven different faculty on how their Marquette Law School courses draw on her writings as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since 2004 or as a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court between 1999 and 2004. This is the third of the seven essays. The illustration of the faculty member, taken from the magazine and appearing here with the blog post, is by John Jay Cabuay.

A little more than a decade ago, I switched from teaching Criminal Law with a traditional casebook, featuring opinions from across the United States, to doing so using almost entirely Wisconsin materials. One of the benefits of the change is that it allows students to start to familiarize themselves with the criminal code many of them will spend their lives working with. They begin to learn how to work with the statutes, including how to interpret their occasionally unclear provisions. So the 2004 case of State ex rel. Kalal v. Circuit Court for Dane County—more often referred to simply as Kalal—would have appeared in the materials I prepared no matter what the statute it interpreted: For more than two decades, it has served as the authoritative source on statutory interpretive methodology in Wisconsin. And it would have appeared early in the semester, among the other foundational concepts.

But, as it happens, the substance of Kalal involves questions that are appropriate to a criminal law class also in a general sense—in fact, foundational, beginning-of-the-semester concepts. The case concerns an effort to invoke Wis. Stat. § 968.02, which creates a mechanism to bypass a district attorney’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion in cases where “a district attorney refuses or is unavailable to issue a complaint.” In the case, the Dane County district attorney had not pursued a former employee’s claim that her employer stole money meant for her 401(k) retirement account. The district attorney’s office had not expressly said that it was not going to proceed.

The core question in Kalal concerns the meaning of the word refuses—in particular, whether a failure to act qualifies as a refusal. But a substantial part of its value in the classroom stems from consideration of why the district attorney chose not to prosecute the case in the first place. What is prosecutorial discretion? Why does it exist? What sorts of considerations properly go into its exercise? What might have been behind the district attorney’s decision not to prosecute in Kalal?

The operation of the bypass statute generates another set of questions. Why did the case end up before a judge from another county? Why does the law provide for the possibility of a special prosecutor? Functionally, what might be the result of allowing district attorneys to prevent bypass by simply delaying their decisions about whether to prosecute?

The cumulative effect is to facilitate an initial survey of the procedural and atmospheric dimensions of criminal law, and at just the right time in the semester.

And, finally, there’s that for which Kalal is famous: its interpretive method, involving modified textualism. We read the case a couple weeks into the semester, just as the excitement of the early days of law school is turning into a sense of being overwhelmed by the new ideas, the new vocabulary—the sense that it’s all a little hard to pin down, that every answer is some version of “it depends.” Here, at last, is a recipe, an actual formula to follow! Or so it seems. I find that I have to dampen the enthusiasm a bit, to emphasize that even within Kalal’s framework there are judgments to be made, and to make clear that not every effort to figure out what a statute means requires resorting to the full machinery of that framework.

Even so, as I said to my first-year students in Criminal Law in the fall of 2024, “Kalal is everywhere.” I had statutory interpretation in mind when I said that—the idea that the framework is operating in the background, so to speak, every time one reads a Wisconsin statute. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that it’s the most-cited case in the history of the Wisconsin Supreme Court or that prosecutorial discretion also factors into every criminal case. Kalal is everywhere in those senses, too. The case more than merits the “Kalal is everywhere” buttons that a student was inspired to distribute among the class the following week.