Brian K. Hagedorn is an American lawyer and a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, serving since 2019. Prior to his election to the Supreme Court, he served four years as a judge on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in the Waukesha-based District II.
Hagedorn was an attorney at the Milwaukee firm Foley & Lardner until 2009, when he was appointed as a law clerk to Wisconsin Supreme Court JusticeMichael Gableman. In 2010, Hagedorn was employed as an assistant attorney general in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, under Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen. In December 2010, Hagedorn was appointed chief legal counsel to the Republican Governor-elect Scott Walker. He would remain in that office through July 2015. As chief legal counsel, Hagedorn was a drafter of Walker's controversial Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill of 2011, and, in 2014, he served as appointing authority for defense counsel hired to represent state prosecutors sued by targets of a John Doe probe into Walker's staff. On July 30, 2015, Walker appointed Hagedorn to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to be chambered in the Waukesha-based District II. Hagedorn took office on August 1, 2015 and replaced retiring Chief Judge Richard S. Brown, who served on the court from 1978 to 2015 and as chief judge from 2007. In 2016, Hagedorn founded the private Christian school K-6 school the Augustine Academy in Merton, Wisconsin.
In the mid-2000s, while Hagedorn was in law school, he argued that the Supreme Court ruling that found that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional could lead to legalized bestiality. In an October 2005 blog post that criticized the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Lawrence v. Texas, he stated that "..render laws prohibiting bestiality unconstitutional the idea of homosexual behavior is different than bestiality as a constitutional matter is unjustifiable". He also argued that gay pride month created "a hostile work environment for Christians." Hagedorn was paid more than $3,000 to give speeches between 2015 and 2017 to a Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom, which defends and promotes traditional views of the human person, marriage, and the role of faith in a person's public life. Augustine Academy, the school Hagedorn founded, has a code of conduct that bars teachers, parents and students from "participating in immoral sexual activity", which is defined as any form of touching or nudity for the purpose of evoking sexual arousal apart from the context of marriage between one man and one woman. Teachers who violate the policy can be dismissed and students can be expelled for their or their parents' actions. The school's "Statement of Faith" states that "Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women," and "..., men and women are not simply interchangeable, nor is gender subject to one's personal preferences." Following newspaper reports about these policies in February 2019, the Wisconsin Realtors Association withdrew its support for Hagedorn and asked Hagedorn to return an $18,000 donation it had made to him in January 2019.
Wisconsin Supreme Court
2019 election
In 2019 Judge Hagedorn ran for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to succeed retiring Justice Shirley Abrahamson, who had served on the court since 1976. His opponent in the election was Lisa Neubauer, Chief Judge of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. Based on unofficial results in the nonpartisan general election, Hagedorn originally led by 5,962 votes out of 1.2 million cast, a margin of about 0.5%, and a post-election canvas increased his lead slightly to around 6,100 votes. Under state law, Neubauer could have requested a recount as long as the difference in votes in the final tally was less than 1%, but Neubauer would have had to fund the recount herself because the difference was greater than 0.25%, which is the margin that triggers a taxpayer-funded recount. Instead, Neubauer conceded to Hagedorn.
Tenure
Justice Hagedorn was inaugurated on August 1, 2019. In a case involving attempts by conservative groups to force the state Elections Commission to purge more than 230,000 voters from the active voter rolls, Justice Hagedorn sided with the liberal justices' position that the Court should not review a lower court's opinion which had halted the purge. Hagedorn's decision resulted in a 3–3 tie on the Court, due to Justice Daniel Kelly's recusal, leaving the lower court ruling in place. In May 2020, Hagedorn dissented from the conservative majority's decision to invalidate Governor Tony Evers' stay-at-home order in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. He wrote of the majority opinion, "We are not here to do freewheeling constitutional theory. We are not here to step in and referee every intractable political stalemate. In striking down most of, this court has strayed from its charge and turned this case into something quite different than the case brought to us." Conservatives, including outgoing justice Daniel Kelly, subsequently expressed disappointment with Hagedorn. Given several of his rulings in 2019 and 2020, the Associated Press theorized that Justice Hagedorn could become a swing vote on the Court after the inauguration of liberal justice Jill Karofsky in August 2020.
