The Wisconsin Legislature passed new state legislative maps on January 23 and 24, 2024. First, the Senate passed a substitute amendment to 2023 Assembly Bill 415. It passed 17-14, with the support of only Republican senators. The next day, the Assembly passed the same amendment, likewise without Democratic support. Governor Evers promised to veto the maps shortly thereafter.
The legislature’s latest maps are very similar to the remedial maps submitted by Evers himself to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Compared to his plan, the maps passed by the legislature move 1,292 out of 202,510 census blocks. The main motivation seems to have been separating incumbent Republican legislators paired in the governor’s map.
In making these small changes, the Republican legislators created three noncontiguous districts–two in the Assembly and one in the Senate. The noncontiguous blocks are small and unpopulated. They could easily be assigned to an actually adjacent district without changing anything meaningful about the district.
The blocks are 550099400071006 in Assembly district 88, the same block in Senate district 30, and 550350008031031 and 550350003011036 in Assembly district 93.
The maps below show each of these districts. The noncontiguous blocks are shown in red. The main component of the district is shown in blue.
I created these districts using the block assignment file used to draft the legislation in question, which I obtained from the Legislative Reference Bureau. You can download a copy here. I also verified these block assignments within the full text of the substitute amendment, which you can view here.
Click each image to view it as an interactive web map.
AD 88
AD 93
SD 30
Regarding the joint stipulation
A set of ward fragments (themselves consisting of multiple blocks) contain incorrect ward and municipality labels. All the parties agreed on a list of such blocks in a joint stipulation dated January 2. These ward fragments do contain the three noncontiguous census blocks in the legislature’s latest plan. The meaning of the join stipulation is contested among the parties, but it is clear that the stipulation does not challenge the location of any of the given census blocks. Moreover, the legislative Republicans are one of the parties explicitly rejecting the idea that the join stipulation had anything to do with contiguity. See footnote 8 of their response brief filed January 22.
For a thorough discussion of the join stipulation and contiguity, see this blog post which describes similar contiguity issues in the Senate Democrats proposed remedial map.
Last academic year, I wrote a series of blog posts giving some glimpses into the work and world of the Law School’s Office of Public Service (see here for the collection). While I did not know, in writing the first post, that I would feel moved to do a weekly series, this was a virtue of the first, in that otherwise I might not have posted at all. The vice was that I did not pass off enough costs. This year, in a related context, I’ll correct for the vice, even at the expense of forgoing the virtue.
All of this is to introduce a series of blog posts that a number of us at the Law School envision this semester concerning our Office of Student Affairs. The name may have somewhat less recognition than OPS for a variety of reasons. They include that the assistant dean leading the office (Anna Fodor) has an administrative title (assistant dean of students) that does not precisely correspond to the “office.” There is also the fact that “student affairs,” as we conceive it at Marquette Law School, is exquisitely enmeshed with academic affairs, which Professor Nadelle Grossman leads as associate dean. A “final” reason is that some of us tend to think of Suite 238, the home of student affairs, simply as “the main office,” no doubt having carried the association with us from Room 146 in Sensenbrenner Hall, the Law School’s former home.
In any event, this is the first post in our effort to capture or describe a sphere in which Dean Fodor and a number of colleagues work to support and enhance the experience of law students. They include Nicole Toerpe Mason, the Law School’s registrar; Stephanie Danz, assistant registrar; Sarah DiStefano, assistant director of student affairs (lest it be thought that we never use the phrase in a title); and Emma Geiser, whom you may recognize from her work at the front desk in the office. No doubt subsequent posts will mention them more specifically.
My particular interest in this post, besides providing the introduction(s), is to note the comprehensive work of the Office of Student Affairs team. In a sense, this can be captured by reference to the bookends of the academic year or even of the Marquette Law School experience: New Student Orientation in the fall and the Hooding and Commencement Ceremony in the spring. Both of these are “productions” of the Office of Student Affairs, even as they necessarily draw substantially on the work of numerous other colleagues and offices at the Law School.
To be sure, many things happen in student affairs between the beginning and the end, even while (as I said in my most recent welcome-back letter) students’ “time here is spent, in a sense, primarily with faculty.” Some relatively new experiments in the student affairs realm seem to be becoming staples. “Fall in the Forum,” a community gathering the past two Septembers, may be one such. I myself especially appreciate this effort—and only partly because it has helped support my long-held intuition that the Zilber Forum, at the center of Eckstein Hall, would be a fine venue for an event with live music. “Finals Breakfast for Dinner” is a few years older yet and has the advantage of being unambiguously about food for law students (on an evening during the fall and spring semester exam periods).
Those references are to particular events that tend to have a celebratory or community-building focus about them. Law School, like much of life, is sometimes a slog—or, to sound another theme from my most recent welcome-back letter, a process of “habit-making.” In that regard, the Office of Student Affairs also provides both a number of programs that span the academic year, such as the Academic Success Program and Marquette Law Mentorship Program (also well captured in this photo), and ongoing services, such as one-on-one advising and support touching on almost every aspect of student life. Future blog posts in this series will have occasion to delve into those.
Words and even examples can communicate only so much, but I am very confident that, through this series, what we find together will give us all a deeper sense of just what a special community Marquette Law School is.
Did I mention that I will not be doing all of the posts? That is part of the reason that I can be so confident.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court enjoined the further use of Wisconsin’s existing state legislative maps in any future election when it ruled on December 22, 2023 that the current maps are unconstitutional because they include noncontiguous districts. The state constitution requires “[Assembly] districts to be bounded by county, precinct, town or ward lines, to consist of contiguous territory and be in as compact form as practicable” (Wis. Const., art. IV, sec. IV).
Previously, this provision had been interpreted to allow physically separated sections of a single municipality to be placed in a single district, even if this meant that the district, taken as a whole, lacked contiguity.
The 2023 ruling rejected this flexible definition of contiguity in favor of a strictly literal rule. “[F]or a district to be composed of contiguous territory, its territory must be touching such that one could travel from one point in the district to any other point in the district without crossing district lines.” Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, 2023 WI 79, ¶ 66. Literal islands don’t violate this requirement. “A district can still be contiguous if it contains territory with portions of land separated by water.” Id., ¶ 27.
Extent of noncontiguity
Seven proposed redistricting plans were submitted to the Supreme Court on January 12, 2024, as discussed in an earlier post. One of them—that of the Democratic Senator Respondents—includes several Assembly districts with noncontiguous land areas.
In an Expert Report submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in support of the remedial maps proposed by the Democratic Senator Respondents, Kenneth Mayer maintains that these districts should not be counted as noncontiguous. “The remaining cases of apparent non-contiguity stem from ward fragments resulting from errors in the underlying Census data, which the parties have agreed should not be counted as noncontiguous” (p. 7 of the report). I discuss below whether this data stipulation has any relevance to territorial contiguity.
The noncontiguous Assembly districts are the 44th, 45th, 47th, 48th, 91st, 92nd, and 98th. In total, the unconnected segments include 34 census blocks, of which two are populated according to the 2020 census count. The populated blocks are “550250008001000” in AD48 (pop. 88) and “550350008021018” in AD92 (pop. 14). The remaining blocks are generally tiny strips of land and in any event are unpopulated.
The redistricting plans submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court are defined by block assignment files—spreadsheets which list each census block in Wisconsin, along with the district to which it is assigned. I obtained the block assignment files for this plan from links shared by Senate Minority Leader Hesselbein on X on January 12th.
I measure district noncontiguity by matching the block assignment files to the Census Bureau’s block GIS file. Then, I measure the adjacency of each census block and identify the components of the resulting network. Replication code is available here.
The following graphics show the noncontiguous sections of each Assembly district. Each block in the main component of the district is outlined in blue. Any disconnected blocks are outlined in red. Click here to view a web page with interactive web maps.
The Joint Stipulation
On January 2, the parties to the case filed a joint stipulation describing a series of deviations, agreed to by all parties, from the official redistricting data.
The stipulation mainly deals with 216 ward fragments, themselves including nearly 300 blocks, with incorrect ward or municipality labels. The incorrect labels seem to originate with the original Census Bureau data. This matters because the parties don’t want to be penalized for splitting a ward (or municipality) when, really, it is the label that is incorrect. In the stipulation, the parties agreed on a consistent way to correct and handle these ward and municipality designations.
The position of the Democratic Senator Respondents is that this stipulation also means that the specified blocks should not be counted as physically noncontiguous with the rest of the district.
Here are the relevant paragraphs from the Joint Stipulation. In his report (p. 7 & n.6), Mayer cites paragraphs 8 and 9. I also include paragraph 7, which may be relevant.
7. All parties agree that the Franklin ward and the 215 additional ward fragments identified in Appendix A do not reflect true municipal-ward “islands,” that is, noncontiguous territory which is separated by the territory of another municipality from the major part of the municipality to which it belongs, see Wis. Stat. § 5.15(1)(b), (2)(f)(3).
8. All parties agree that detaching any of the 216 ward fragments identified in Appendix A from the rest of the ward to which it is assigned in the August 2021 Redistricting Dataset will not count as a ward split when evaluating a proposed remedial map.
9. All parties agree that any of the 216 ward fragments identified in Appendix A will be considered part of the municipality to which the August 2021 Redistricting Dataset and the 2020 Census Redistricting Data assigned it, regardless of whether that assignment may have been due to error in the U.S. Census data, when evaluating a proposed remedial map.
Paragraphs 8 and 9 address whether or not incorrectly labelled blocks should be counted as ward or municipality splits. This has nothing to do with physical contiguity.
The meaning of paragraph 7 is less clear to me. What does it mean to say that the ward fragments are not actually “separated by the territory of another municipality from the major part of the municipality to which it belongs”? What if the ward fragment is separated by another district from the main body of the district to which it belongs?
One thing is clear. The Joint Stipulation does not dispute the actual physical location of any of the census blocks. Using the Census Bureau’s census block GIS file to draw maps defined by the Democratic Senator Respondents’ block assignment files will still result in situations where landbound portions of some districts are unconnected to the rest of the district.
Last academic year, I wrote a series of blog posts giving some glimpses into the work and world of the Law School’s Office of Public Service (