Attorneys Doug Poland, left, and Jeffrey Mandell announced the formation of Law Forward in October.
It was the stuff of comic opera. In December, Republican electors met, cast their votes for Donald Trump and dutifully sent off the paperwork to the proper officials in Washington. Never mind that Trump had lost Wisconsin and their goofy escapade was meaningless.
Technically, it may also have been illegal. That’s what a new nonprofit progressive law firm is saying, anyway. Law Forward has filed a complaint with the state Elections Commission alleging forgery and misconduct in public office among other things.
Wisconsin Law Forward was formed recently in large part as a liberal response to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. I wrote about WILL a year ago in a cover story for Isthmus. What I found was a well-heeled outfit run by a Harvard lawyer. WILL’s largest single funding source is the conservative Bradley Foundation. WILL has occasionally represented or weighed in on behalf of news outlets like Isthmus and The Progressive in open records cases, but for the most part you’ll find them fighting for things like school choice and against things like mask mandates and fair redistricting.
In doing my research for the Isthmus article I talked with attorney Jeffrey Mandell, who is now legal counsel for and a founder of Law Forward. He is joined there by attorney Doug Poland, who has been active in legal fights against extreme political gerrymandering among other good causes.
Mandell was concerned about WILL because he saw them as strategically chipping away at some of the very foundations of worker and environmental protections. Mandell explained how cases that seemed trivial to a layperson could be laying the groundwork for overturning massive numbers of laws and regulations.
Maybe WILL is still at it. But I have remained on WILL’s email update list since writing the story and what I’ve noticed is that the group seems to be more obsessed with the culture wars — and especially fanning stereotypes about Madison — than in doing serious legal battle over fundamental issues.
WILL’s latest escapade is to attack a Madison ordinance designed to protect birds. Last August the city council passed an ordinance requiring builders of large projects (over 10,000 square feet) to use glass that uses embedded patterns so that it becomes more visible to the birds and they don’t end up dead on the pavement below.
Seems reasonable enough to me, but the Wisconsin Builders Association objects to it on the grounds that the glass is much more expensive than regular bird-killing glass and, anyway they say, Madison can’t require it because it exceeds the state’s uniform building code.
I don’t fault the builders association for challenging the glass ordinance. It’s in their own interests to do that. But I don’t see the fundamental issue here for WILL. It seems like a technical fight over which level of government can do what within a pretty narrow range of circumstances.
It looks to me like this is WILL just engaging in a culture war dustup to play to its funding base: “See! There go those crazy Madisonians again, hugging their birds, heedless of the cost!”
So, I’m glad there is now a law firm to respond on the other side when WILL takes another shot at something I care about — though Law Forward has not specifically looked into the glass issue yet.
Now, it does seem to me that Law Forward’s challenge to the Republican electors is a waste of time. What the Republicans did was more ludicrous than dangerous. It’s penny ante stuff.
Much more significant is Law Forward’s work on some very substantive cases. Its website lays out its current areas of interest, which include protecting voting rights, fair redistricting, and protecting environmental and worker protection regulations against legal attacks.
So, for example, Law Forward is fighting WILL’s attempts on behalf of former Republican Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen to short circuit the process by giving the Wisconsin Supreme Court original jurisdiction over the inevitable suit that will be filed over the next round of redistricting. That’s important because a suit that ends up in federal court is much more likely to result in fair maps than one that goes to the state high court, where conservatives hold a 4-3 majority.
Law Forward has also defended Madison’s “Democracy in the Park” program of last summer, where voters were given the chance to drop off ballots in a safe setting. And it is going up against WILL again, fighting back over its attempt to disenfranchise about 200,000 Wisconsin voters who may have moved since last registering to vote.
I once had some hope for WILL. I didn’t think it was a bad thing to have a nonprofit law firm fighting back against government overreach. But what WILL has clearly now shown itself to be is just a front for the Republican Party and an organization that will stoke any culture war issue to buy itself attention.
While I wish Law Forward had let the comic opera of the Republican electors go, the new public interest firm promises to be an antidote to WILL’s attacks on fundamental democratic institutions.
