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Madison — A recent court filing raises questions about whether four of the state's seven Supreme Court justices can hear one or more challenges to an ongoing probe into whether a conservative group illegally coordinated with Gov. Scott Walker's campaign.

Two nationally known legal ethics experts said Justice David Prosser should step aside in the case, adding others may have to do so as well. Two others said they saw no reason for any of the justices to recuse themselves.

The investigation is shrouded in secrecy, as are the legal fights challenging the ability of prosecutors to conduct their probe. In many instances, even the names of those fighting the investigation are unknown.

The Kansas City law firm Graves Garrett is involved in the matter, and a recent court filing shows the firm represents the Wisconsin Club for Growth, one of the probe's targets.

In recent years, the club has spent about $1.8 million to help the four justices who make up the conservative bloc controlling the court — $400,000 for Annette Ziegler in 2007; $507,000 for Michael Gableman in 2008; $520,000 for Prosser in 2011; and $350,000 for Patience Roggensack in 2013. Those figures are estimates tabulated by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which opposes undisclosed spending by groups such as the Club for Growth.

The club's spending helped the four, but the group was by no means the only one spending on the races. Some of those contests cost nearly $6 million when accounting for spending by all candidates and outside groups.

In addition, the club was the sole funder of Citizens for a Strong America in 2011, and that group spent an estimated $985,000 that year to help Prosser. Both the club and Citizens for a Strong America were subpoenaed as part of the investigation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat, and other prosecutors are looking into whether the club or others illegally coordinated with Walker's campaign when he faced his recall election in 2012. John Doe probes allow prosecutors to compel witnesses to testify and produce documents and bar them from speaking publicly about the case.

Some of the targets have challenged the investigation in state and federal court, but much about those cases is unknown because of the secrecy governing John Doe investigations.

The liberal group One Wisconsin Now recently wrote to the Supreme Court saying the four justices should step aside from the cases because of the club's spending. If all four were to do that, the court wouldn't have enough members to hear the case and it would have to be decided by lower courts.

Another justice — Ann Walsh Bradley — has recused herself from one of the cases because her son works at the same law firm as Dean Strang, a Madison attorney helping to spearhead the challenge to the investigation in state court. She is expected to step aside in at least one other case.

Some experts on when justices must step aside in cases said the four conservative justices would need to analyze the potential conflict, and two of them said Prosser and possibly others should recuse themselves. Two others said all the justices could remain on the cases and a fifth said the public needs to know more before it can properly gauge the situation.

Like many states, Wisconsin requires judges to bow out of cases if an observer knowing all the facts could reasonably question their impartiality. But another rule says campaign contributions and independent spending, absent other factors, aren't enough to warrant getting out of cases.

Meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that judges must recuse themselves from cases when a party has spent huge sums to help them win election. In that case, a coal executive spent $3 million to help elect a justice to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, that state's highest court. After the election, the executive's company won dismissal of a $50 million jury verdict with the backing of the justice the executive helped elect.

The U.S. Supreme Court later forced the West Virginia justice off the case, ruling 5-4 that having him sit on the case created a risk of bias that was so high as to violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of due process. That decision left open questions about precisely how much money must be in play to create conflicts of interest, and legal experts differ over when judges can remain on cases involving campaign supporters.

In Wisconsin, a judge decides on his or her own whether to remain on a case, and the state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in 2011 that justices cannot review each other's decisions on whether to remain on cases. Thus, if a Wisconsin justice decides to stay on a case, the U.S. Supreme Court may be the only one that could overturn that determination.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, said under Wisconsin's rules Prosser should step aside. The others may need to do so as well, depending on the particulars of their races and the help the Wisconsin Club for Growth provided them, he said.

The club's level of spending in Prosser's 2011 race "is sufficient to warrant recusal in a case in which the club has publicly expressed a strong interest, on the ground that the judge's impartiality might reasonably be questioned," Gillers wrote in an email to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It doesn't mean the judge will be partial. The rule means to ensure public confidence. Its focus is the need for the appearance of impartiality."

Asked about the other three justices who got help from the club, Gillers said it would depend on how close the races were and how the club's spending compared to overall spending in the race.

Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor with expertise on judicial ethics, wrote in an email to the Journal Sentinel that he believed "a reasonable person would doubt (Prosser's) capacity to be fair" because of the amount of money the club spent to help him and because his election was so recent.

For the others, if a reasonable person saw the spending as "instrumental to the justice's election, it certainly would contribute to the conclusion that the justice's impartiality might reasonably be questioned and that disqualification is necessary," he wrote. For those justices, the matter is a close call, he wrote.

But Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former member of the Federal Election Commission, said no justice needed to step aside because of a rule the state Supreme Court adopted in 2010 that says campaign spending by those with cases before the court is not enough, on its own, to force judges off cases.

"The court has already set the rule, and said that is not the grounds for recusal," von Spakovsky said.

Without such a rule, interest groups could game the system by running campaign ads and thereby keep justices they don't like off cases, he argued.

The court approved the rule on a 4-3 vote, with the four justices who benefited from the Wisconsin Club for Growth's spending in the majority. The three dissenters contended the rule would damage the court's reputation.

Rick Esenberg, an adjunct law professor at Marquette University and head of a conservative public interest law firm, said he saw no reason any of the four would need to recuse themselves.

Wisconsin's founders decided to elect judges, and with that comes an expectation that justices would be able to separate their judicial work from what happens in campaigns, he said.

"The whole thing (regarding campaign-related recusal) gets to be at war with judicial elections," said Esenberg, president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. "If we want to have them elected, at some point we have to trust people to put these things aside."

Esenberg said if Prosser had to get off the case, then Appeals Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg also could not participate because she was Prosser's opponent in 2011 and the Club for Growth spent money against her.

Kloppenburg was one of three appeals judges to rule against a challenge in January and allow the John Doe investigation to continue. At the time she considered the case, the public did not know the Wisconsin Club for Growth was a party to the case because of the secret nature of the matter.

Matthew Menendez, who specializes in campaign spending in court races as counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the secrecy surrounding the cases makes it impossible for the public to know whether any of the justices should recuse themselves.

The investigation centers on whether the club or others illegally helped Walker. Allegations such as that could lead some to question whether the club illegally helped the justices it supported, he said — creating high-stakes questions the justices must consider as they mull whether to remain on the cases.

"What public opinion polls and common sense has shown is people are naturally suspicious when a lawyer or litigant has been a major backer of a judge," Menendez said.