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 sixth 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.

We have used opinions by Judge Diane Sykes in two of my classes. In both instances, I looked for an opinion that presented a complicated doctrinal issue in clear terms that students could understand and debate.

In Copyrights, for many years, I supplemented the casebook with Kelley v. Chicago Park District, a Seventh Circuit decision from 2011. Kelley deals with a basic yet challenging question: what, exactly, is a copyrightable work? Protected works must meet at least two requirements: they have to be authored, and they have to be written or recorded somehow—in the words of the statute, “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.”

Not many cases deal with either issue, and what cases there are tend to arise in the context of new technologies, such as computers or remote-controlled cameras. Students struggle, for example, to determine if a temporary copy made in a computer’s volatile memory counts as “fixed.”

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 fifth 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.

I switch over late in the semester in first-year Property from traditional common-law doctrine to modern zoning law. The students for the most part welcome the switch, but some find the abundant map amendments, conditional permits, special uses, and assorted variances as problematic additions to existing zoning ordinances. Fortunately for instructor and students alike, Justice Diane Sykes’s thoughtful opinion for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in State ex rel. Ziervogel v. Board of Adjustment (2004) not only sorts out the state standards for variances but also provides a valuable metaphor for understanding how variances might best be conceived.

The case itself involved a request for a variance from Richard Ziervogel and Maureen McGinnity, of Washington County. Ziervogel and McGinnity owned a property that fronted Big Cedar Lake and included a 1,600-square-foot summer home, located 26 feet from the high-water line for the lake. In hopes of converting the summer home to a year-round house, Ziervogel and McGinnity sought to add 10 feet to the top of their summer home, a vertical addition that would ultimately include an office and two bedrooms. In order to do so, they requested a variance because the local zoning ordinance prohibited the expansion of any structure within 50 feet of the lake. The local zoning board had denied the request, and the case, as it came through the courts, concerned the standard properly to be applied in considering a variance.

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 fourth 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.

In Contracts, a required first-year course each fall, we use one opinion by Judge Diane Sykes. And this past year, a second of the judge’s opinions shaped my final exam.

The case we study together is Karma International, LLC v. Indianapolis Motor Speedway, LLC, a 2019 Seventh Circuit decision. The opening line draws us in: “The Indianapolis 500 race has been a fixture of American life since 1911, interrupted only by world war.” Judge Sykes wrote the opinion addressing mutual breach claims between an event-planning company (a licensee of Maxim, the men’s magazine) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway over a disappointing party at the race’s historic 100th running.

We use the case to learn the requirement that contract damages cannot rest on speculation. The court of appeals affirmed summary judgment against Karma on its claim because its damages theory was “entirely speculative,” emphasizing that “a factfinder may not award damages on the mere basis of conjecture or speculation.” The facts make the principle memorable: although 1,787 guests attended Karma’s event, the company had sold only 92 full-price tickets. Most importantly, it could not provide concrete evidence how greater promotional efforts by the speedway would have caused more tickets to be sold or yielded more revenue. Students can grasp quickly why the law demands more than hopeful arithmetic.