Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg believes money in the State Supreme Court race impairs a justice’s ability to be impartial. In fact, when she ran for State Supreme Court in 2011, she was an outspoken critic of the recusal ruling the court made in 2009 and 2010. This ruling found endorsements and political spending weren’t enough to require judges and justices to step down from cases.

But Kloppenburg, as an appeals court justice, saw it fit to stay and submit a case involving a group that spent money against her in the 2011 State Supreme Court election. She ended up ruling against that group, keeping alive an investigation into Gov. Scott Walker’s recall campaign.

Kloppenburg tried to explain this in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“When you have someone running ads for you there is a perception of quid pro quo that doesn’t exist when someone is running ads against you,” she said.

I would argue money is money, whether or not it is spent advocating for or against a candidate. Maybe to her this isn’t a conflict of interests, but to me it is. Whenever money enters a judicial campaign, no matter where it goes, it affects the partiality of that justice.

This isn’t just my opinion. A 2009 study by the Duke Law Journal shows judges “routinely adjust their rulings to attract votes and campaign money.”

This shows it doesn’t necessarily matter what Kloppenburg said to the Journal Sentinel. The fact that a group spent against her in the election may have given her a subconscious, unfair bias against them, and for that, she should have excused herself from hearing the case.

In this current Supreme Court election, Kloppenburg continues her 2011 stance on recusal. But she isn’t practicing what she preaches, so how are we supposed to trust her decisions as a Supreme Court justice? Are her decisions merely good suggestions, that we don’t really needed to take seriously?

The only thing we know is that because of money in judicial elections whoever is elected as Supreme Court justice will inherit certain biases affecting their rulings.

Aaron Reilly ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in Russian and comparative literature.