Patrick Marley

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON - Lisa Neubauer sees her life in the law as a form of public service.

On her first day at Milwaukee law firm Foley & Lardner in 1989, she took a pro bono case representing inmates that led to safety upgrades at an overcrowded Green Bay prison.

Ten years later, she represented a Racine day care facility pro bono to get its landlord to address asbestos concerns.

Her approach to the law started before she went to law school when she signed on as a plaintiff challenging Chicago’s policy of strip searching women who came into police stations.

“She’s not high drama, never has been,” said Thomas Shriner, a Foley partner who worked with her for nearly 20 years. “There are people who are calm and cool and there are people who are screamers. I will say Lisa and I had in common our preference for the former way of approaching litigation and solving problems.”

Now, Neubauer — the chief judge for the state Appeals Court — wants to join the state Supreme Court. She faces fellow appeals Judge Brian Hagedorn in the April 2 election for a 10-year term on the court.

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Neubauer, 61, grew up in Minneapolis and, after stints at other colleges, followed a family tradition of attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That’s when she had a run in with the Chicago police in 1978.

After a Talking Heads concert, her friend was arrested when he took a parking ticket from someone else’s car. When Neubauer visited the police station to try to help him, she was strip-searched under a policy police applied to women who came to the station, even if they weren’t suspected of a crime.

She immediately filed a complaint.

“They were not really interested in letting me file a complaint and told me it was policy,” she said. “So I had to really persist to even file the complaint.”

Jane Doe No. 1

When she learned the American Civil Liberties Union planned to pursue a lawsuit, she contacted the group and became Jane Doe No. 1 in its lawsuit. The case drew national attention — Neubauer appeared on Phil Donahue’s talk show to discuss what happened to her — and Chicago quickly changed its policy.

“There were a lot of women that didn’t tell anyone it happened to them,” she said. “But for me, it was such a clear violation and I was just so committed to pursuing it.”

In 1987, Neubauer earned her law degree from the University of Chicago and took a job clerking for U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb in Madison.

From there, she went to Foley & Lardner, where she focused on insurance litigation.

In 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and over the next year had surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The experience didn't slow her down and two weeks after her surgery, she participated in a walk for a group fighting breast cancer, according to a 2006 letter from her colleague Bartholomew Reuter, who nominated her for an award.

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed Neubauer to the Waukesha-based District 2 Court of Appeals in 2007. She won a full term on the court in 2008 and was re-elected in 2014.

Ties to Democratic politics

Neubauer has personal and family ties to Democratic politics. She served as an aide to state Sen. Fred Risser of Madison and worked on the presidential campaign of Gary Hart in 1984.

Her husband, Jeff, is a former chairman of the state Democratic Party and former member of the Assembly. One of their three children, Greta, now holds a seat in that house.

In 2017, Neubauer attended a march protesting President Donald Trump's climate policies. Neubauer said she went there to support her daughter, who organized it.

“I set it aside,” Neubauer said of her political past. “I very intentionally joined the judiciary. I haven’t done anything political — no donations, nothing — for 11 years.”

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Shriner, who has donated hundreds of dollars to former Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans, said he never saw Neubauer allow politics to influence her work.

“There are people in this law firm who talk politics at the water cooler,” he said. “Lisa was never one of them. That has never really been what I’ve heard her talk about. … She is really a very fine judge and I think her approach to the bench is not partisan. I think it’s judicial.”

Named chief judge of appeals court

The Supreme Court in 2015 named Neubauer the chief judge of the appeals court.

Lisa Stark, the deputy chief judge for the appeals court, said Neubauer handles administrative matters effectively and takes input from others before making decisions.

Stark and Neubauer serve on different districts of the appeals court but have occasionally worked on cases together as part of a panel. Neubauer's a good listener and tries to build consensus, Stark said.

“She’s just really approachable, very open," Stark said. "I have to say that she doesn’t come to the decision conference with any type of agenda, political or otherwise.”

In the race for Supreme Court, Neubauer has avoided saying what she thinks of many high-profile cases.

“I’m not going to weigh in on that,” she said of cases that upheld Act 10, the 2011 law that largely eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers. Hagedorn helped write the law and defend it in court as chief counsel to Walker.

Neubauer called the 2015 ruling that legalized gay marriage a good decision but has mostly remained quiet about other major cases, including Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion.

Wrote dissent in abortion case

As an appeals judge, Neubauer wrote a dissent in 2016 that said the court should have allowed a lawsuit to continue that challenged a law preventing doctors from consulting with women through video links to dispense abortion-inducing drugs.

Neubauer declined to disclose what justices she most admires, saying the question was a proxy for trying to gauge how she would rule on issues. She said the endorsements she’s received from more than 340 judges — including ones from both Republican and Democratic counties — show she’s evenhanded.

"What my record shows is I don’t come to any decision with any predetermined outcome, with any agenda, with any ideology," she said.

Hagedorn has questioned that sentiment, noting Neubauer has praised Shirley Abrahamson, the retiring liberal Supreme Court justice Neubauer hopes to replace. Hagedorn has compared Neubauer to Abrahamson and contended she would steer decisions to her preferences.

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"That’s politicizing the court, that’s holding up a political end and that’s why voters I think should be concerned about a more political form of judging because then personal views really do matter at the end of the day, and politics," Hagedorn said during their first debate.

He also criticized her for declining to talk more about her views on cases and justices.

"Philosophies matter and Judge Neubauer doesn’t want to share hers," he said.

Hagedorn has said he likes conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and the late Antonin Scalia. He favors their originalist approach to the law, in which they interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was adopted.

Neubauer doesn’t agree with that view.

“I do think … that kind of view of interpreting the Constitution as of 1789, that that’s not really the world we live in,” she said.

“So while obviously the text and the intent are absolute starting points and critical for any analysis, we’ve got a lot of precedent that’s happened in between then (and now) and a lot of things that have happened in our society between then (and now), like the Civil War.”

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Neubauer is campaigning in part on improving the reputation of the state Supreme Court. She said the court needs to set stronger rules on when judges and justices must drop out of cases for ethical reasons. And she wants the court to make its administrative meetings public, as it had up until 2017.

“People need to walk through those (courthouse) doors and have confidence that they’re going to receive justice, a level playing field, a fair shake,” Neubauer said. “And my record shows that’s the kind of judge I am.”

Contact Patrick Marley at patrick.marley@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @patrickdmarley.