Will Wisconsin Get New Congressional Maps?

When the election of the liberal justice Janet Protasiewicz flipped the balance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, liberal groups responded immediately. A lawsuit was filed the day after she joined the court, which led to the new liberal majority barring further use of the existing state assembly and senate districts. Those maps had been crafted by Republican legislators and redounded greatly to their benefit. In 2022, the Democratic Governor Tony Evers won reelection with 51.1% of the vote, yet he only carried a majority in 39 of 99 Assembly and 13 of 33 Senate seats.

For fear of the Court imposing an even worse map (for them), Republican legislators responded by passing a map drawn by Evers. Evers accepted this compromise; although it was opposed by almost all state legislators from his own party. The results of this new map were on full display in November 2024. Harris lost the state with 48.7% of the vote, but she still carried a majority of the vote in 49 of 99 assembly seats and 17 of 33 senate seats.

Throughout all of this, the 8 Wisconsin congressional districts remained unchanged. In fact, the congressional map used in 2022 was barely different from the one drawn in 2011.

Spring 2025 once again saw the ideological balance of the Supreme Court at stake. This time, a victory by the conservative candidate would have flipped the majority back to its pre-2023 status quo. Instead, the liberal candidate Susan Crawford won by 10 points, and liberal groups again responded by promptly filing redistricting lawsuits, this time challenging the Congressional map.

To date, two petitions and one complaint (from different prominent firms) have been filed, each making quite different arguments as to why the state courts should toss the current map. The first two petitions were filed directly with the State Supreme Court. Although the court agreed to hear opposing and supporting briefs to the petitions, they ultimately declined to hear them in late June, issuing no comment about the merits of the arguments presented. The third complaint was filed with the Dane County circuit court shortly after the first two were rejected. For reasons I’ll discuss below, this latest case makes arguments which may bear more fruit for those seeking new maps.

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The Safety and Justice Challenge

John Mccaffary Burial MemorialIn Ethics and Infinity, philosopher and Nazi prison survivor Emmanuel Levinas is asked about responsibility for “the Other” and says, “You know that sentence of Dostoyevsky: ‘We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others’. This is not owing to such or such a guilt which is really mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others.”

I was a third-year law student in a seminar on Law and Theology when I read that passage and wrestled with it. The philosophical writings of the Jewish Holocaust survivors and of German Christian writers, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who suffered under the Nazi regime examined the obligation of the individual in relation to others and the state. Levinas was asserting an extraordinarily expansive (and I thought at the time unrealistic) ethical obligation of the person in relation to the other: to be wholly responsible for seeing and uplifting the human dignity of others, even if there is no reciprocity. Is it possible to secure safety and to render justice to the idea of human dignity at the same time?

At that stage in my education, I had already worked with prisoners as a law student in a clinic, so I had some sense how dehumanizing a jail or prison is to the people locked inside. I had also worked in a prosecutor’s office directing people into the prison or jail system and could understand why some people had to be removed from the community. Both experiences shaped my professional views.

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Tesla to Face Jury Trial over Autopilot Defects Following 70-Page Summary Judgment Opinion

Tesla’s “Autopilot” has been implicated in over a dozen deaths in the U.S. alone, and yet the company has yet to face a significant finding of liability in a litigated case. That may end soon, as trial is set to begin in federal court today following a blockbuster summary judgment opinion issued only a few weeks ago.

Benavides v. Tesla involves a crash that occurred on a two-lane county road in Key Largo, Florida in 2019. George McGee was driving his Tesla Model S from his office in Boca Raton to his home, a distance of around 100 miles, when he ran through a stop sign at a T-intersection and collided with a Chevy Tahoe that was parked on the far side of the road at around 60 miles per hour. Naibel Benavides, a 22-year-old college student, was standing next to the Tahoe and was killed. Her friend Dillon Angulo—the two were on a date—was severely injured and is also a plaintiff in the case.

The Benavides crash implicates many of the same issues raised by other fatal crashes involving Autopilot. The system, despite its name, is a “driver assistance system” that requires constant oversight by an attentive driver, far short of what most people think of when they imagine an autonomous vehicle. Nor is it capable of functioning in any environment; the instructions explicitly warn drivers not to use it on anything less than a divided, limited-access highway, one without stop signs or crossing traffic.

Because of these limitations, every fatal Autopilot crash has involved a distracted driver. In the Huang case, for example, the plaintiff was killed when his car collided with a concrete barrier on the highway while he played a game on his phone (that case was settled for an undisclosed sum on the eve of trial). The Benavides crash is no different: McGee, the driver, testified in his deposition that he was on the phone with American Airlines trying to book a flight across the country when he dropped his phone and bent down to the floor to pick it up. It was at that moment that he sped through the stop sign and into the parked Chevy. (Benavides filed suit against McGee as well; that suit was settled for an undisclosed sum). McGee also used Autopilot on an inappropriate road, manually accelerated to a speed of 62 miles per hour in an area where the speed limit was 45, and repeatedly triggered Autopilot’s warning system for driver inattention.

Unsurprisingly given the facts outlined above, Tesla’s strategy in these cases has been to cast blame on the driver. At times this has been successful. The first trial involving a fatal crash linked to Autopilot involved a plaintiff-driver who had been drinking, and the jury had no trouble concluding that Tesla bore no blame for the accident. In Benavides, for the first time, the victim is a third party. Still, Tesla argued, it was the driver who was to blame for the crash, not Autopilot.

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