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.

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 first 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.

My first-year torts class reaches something of a climax when we read Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., the landmark 1928 New York Court of Appeals decision. Palsgraf is one of those old chestnuts that are simply irresistible to law professors. It combines engrossing facts, beautiful writing, and philosophical richness. I would probably assign it even if it didn’t have canonical status and thus represent part of the esoteric lingua franca by which first-year law students are inducted into the cult of lawyers.

But Palsgraf can feel, after almost a century of life, somewhat remote. For students in Wisconsin in 2026, who often find the case to be the single most confusing thing they read all semester, a reasonable objection might be “what’s the point?”

The good news for me as a teacher of tort law is that Wisconsin has its own Palsgraf, a 2003 state Supreme Court opinion called Alvarado v. Sersch, which I assign every year immediately after the perhaps somewhat hoary original. Like Palsgraf, Alvarado deals with the question of how far negligence liability ought to extend in situations where the connection between breach and injury feels attenuated.

In Alvarado, the plaintiff was cleaning a student apartment in Madison, at the end of an 11-hour shift during the hectic mid-August turnover period, when she found what she thought was a candle that had been overlooked by the property manager during his inspection of the apartment. The candle turned out to be a firework, and when Alvarado lit the fuse to preserve the pilot light of a stove she intended to clean, it exploded, blowing off most of her right hand.

Both the majority opinion, by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, and Justice Diane Sykes’s dissent in Alvarado engage with Palsgraf and the role it ought to play in 21st-century Wisconsin tort law. Part of the benefit of assigning the case is simply to show students that Wisconsin—most unusually—follows Judge William Andrews’s dissent in Palsgraf, meaning that limitations on negligence liability in Wisconsin are based on an assessment of public policy rather than subtle philosophical elucidations of the concepts of duty and breach, as Judge Benjamin Cardozo set forth for the Palsgraf majority.

But another benefit of Alvarado as pedagogy is having students closely examine the point of departure between majority and dissent and push themselves to be precise in understanding the arguments that might have proved decisive. From this perspective, Justice Sykes’s opinion is a gem, all that a dissent should be: it is shorter than the majority, it eschews scoring easy rhetorical points for the sake of rhetoric alone, and it raises valid concerns about the real-world impact of the majority’s position. I feel confident that, like Palsgraf, Wisconsin law students will still be reading Justice Sykes’s Alvarado dissent a century after it was written.