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 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 second 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.

Every fall semester, my first-year class in Legal Analysis, Writing & Research 1 is filled with eager students, excited to learn the law.

Law students and lawyers know that legal writing is a skills class. I don’t teach doctrine for its own sake, as does, say, a torts professor who teaches about negligence, its elements, and its nuances. I work with students as they learn how to work with doctrine, doing so through an issue grounded in any area of law, whether tort, contract, criminal, constitutional, or property law. Or something else entirely. The overall framework for my instruction is legal reasoning: rule-based, analogical, and policy-based. And that is the order in which I introduce them.