In the view of some liberals, the consequences of liberals napping on their chance to retake the state’s highest court after a decade of conservative control are devastating. Conservative judges profess to uphold the original textual meaning of the law, whereas liberal judges tend to apply more modern interpretations.

“It means at the very least that we’re going to have a court whose judicial philosophy for the most part favors the powerful over the middle class and working people,” said Tim Burns, a liberal attorney who ran for the state Supreme Court in 2018 but lost in the primary to Justice Rebecca Dallet.

But other liberals who believe in the integrity of the court are taking a “wait-and-see” approach with Hagedorn’s addition and are doing their best to believe all justices will hear cases faithfully, putting forth an intellectual effort to apply the correct legal principles.

“I don’t believe that it is as simple as counting up people’s perceived party affiliations and trying to align the parties in any given pursuit with any one ideological side or the other,” said Jeff Mandell, a Madison attorney seeking to overturn Republican lame-duck laws that curb the powers of the governor and attorney general. “Not infrequently you wind up with strange combinations, unexpected combinations of justices on different sides of the issues.”