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.

We begin the semester with a rule-based reasoning problem. Typically, this involves a Wisconsin statute. Sometimes, we use a newly enacted statute, where there is no case law at all. More often, we use a statute (or set of statutes) in isolation, leaving aside for the moment any case law that exists. (I introduce the case law soon enough, when we discuss analogical reasoning.)

If students are going to learn how to interpret statutes for rule-based reasoning, our first stop is, of course, then-Justice Sykes’s 2004 opinion in State ex rel. Kalal v. Circuit Court for Dane County, the most cited-case in the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s history, with more than 1,500 citations to date, including in some 400 opinions of the Supreme Court itself. For our purposes, the facts are less important than the rules—the methodology—that we draw from the case to apply to the statute we are analyzing.

We begin, naturally, at the beginning: with the language of the statute itself. If “the meaning of the statute is plain,” we stop there. The crux of statutory interpretation in Wisconsin law, Justice Sykes explains in Kalal, is to stay within the statute itself. That is, the interpretation of the statute proceeds according to the intrinsic evidence, which can include its “scope, context, and purpose” when those things can be ascertained from the text. “It is the enacted law, not the unenacted intent, that is binding on the public.” Absent ambiguity in the statute, the inquiry does not consult extrinsic evidence, such as legislative history.

Justice Sykes’s opinion presents Kalal as a “clarification” of Wisconsin’s statutory interpretation methodology, although some might say the opinion transformed it. Previous case law had suggested that an extrinsic source such as legislative history was useful in interpreting a statute in the first instance. So, even in the absence of an ambiguous statute, courts sometimes went to extrinsic sources to effectuate the legislature’s intent. Now, though, from Kalal, there are clear steps to unpacking the meaning of a statute (at least in the sense that anything’s really “clear” in interpretation).

One difficulty in this methodology, for me, is trying to explain canons of construction in the first month of law school, when students are still wrapping their heads around so many other new ideas and words. Because under Kalal we use intrinsic evidence in the course of interpreting the meaning of the statutory text, canons of construction are important guideposts. Lawyers are quite familiar with these canons, and many are baked right into the case law. Yet students in the first month of their legal education often do innately and unintentionally apply such canons, even if they have a hard time grasping precisely what they are.

In any event, the Kalal methodology guides us as we examine, for example, whether a Zamboni (an ice resurfacer) is a “motor vehicle” for purposes of Wis. Stats. §§ 340.01(35) & 346.63(1) or whether it is better classified as “road machinery” under Wis. Stat. § 340.01(52). Or whether walking is a recreational activity under § 895.52(1)(g). Or what “reckless or wanton conduct” means under § 895.476, the statute that provides immunity from certain civil liability for harm caused by exposing someone to COVID-19.

Beginning with rule-based reasoning and statutory interpretation under Kalal is a most useful entry to legal analysis—concrete rules are always helpful—and it’s an interesting way for students to compare their initial rule-based conclusions to their later conclusions, after case law is added.