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.

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.