If there’s one thing Americans hold in high esteem, it’s Supreme Court justices. Sure, there are crooked cops, cheating politicians and greedy lawyers, but if there were ever any corrupt judges, it was only in small towns in the South between 1863 and 1964. We see our justice system as almost infallible and Supreme Court justices especially as having unimpeachable character.

It comes as quite a surprise, then, that The Capital Times Jan. 31 article “State Supreme Court justices agree little, trade personal attacks during public meeting” shows the human, petty nature of our sitting judges. When we look closer into this judicial body, it seems a lot less infallible.

The current chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is Justice Shirley Abrahamson, and the other members include Justices Annette Ziegler, David Prosser, Ann Walsh Bradley, Patrick Crooks, Pat Roggensack and Michael Gableman.

Right now, the court faces a schism that divides them into the conservatives (Ziegler, Prosser, Gableman, and Roggensack) and the liberals (Abrahamson, Walsh Bradley, and Crooks). The conservative faction accuses Abrahamson of making decisions without its input, or as Gableman puts it, “Whether this is a court of seven… [or] a court of one.”

Abrahamson, who has been a member of the Supreme Court since 1979 and the Chief Justice since 1996, fired back that the liberals issued an ethics complaint against Gableman for misleading commercials during his campaign and the conservatives moved to tear it down without notifying the others.

This all came to a head on Monday, when Roggensack came up with e-mails that showed that the conservatives had, in fact, notified the liberals about dismissing the ethics complaint. They voted on it, but because of the obvious 3-3 tie (since Gableman couldn’t vote in his own ethics complaint), the court didn’t take any action.

In addition to this squabble, the two factions also argued about a $600 road trip Roggensack took to examine racial patterns in sentencing. They eventually agreed to outline criteria for reimbursement, but not before Prosser and Abrahamson argued; he said she asked him at first to mediate the situation but later tore him down during a private session. She returned that Prosser was only telling a part of the story, and Prosser replied, “Get a Bible in here, and I’d swear to the truth of that.”

What is the most surprising is that the top decision-makers for the Wisconsin judicial system are legally able to bicker in such an unrestrained way. However, if we examine the legal structure, it makes sense. There is no real command hierarchy within the Supreme Court justices except that Shirley Abrahamson is chief justice.

In other aspects, the justices are equal, which makes our system able to function well when deciding the fate of legal cases but makes it function terribly interpersonally. There is no real criteria for decision making; the Wisconsin Supreme Court has outlined a set of internal operating procedures to follow, but even in the first page the document stresses that these are only suggestions for conduct. There is no accountability structure in that those who make the decisions (the justices) do not carry them out.

And there is no feedback structure, meaning that grievances do not go up a chain of command because, effectively, the Supreme Court is the top level. In the case of Ald. Mike Verveer, the decision to punish or not punish him goes to the city, but in the case of Justice Roggensack’s $600 road trip, it is her peers that must hash out the decision.

Our sitting judges are human, and it makes sense that they would divide into parties, bicker and hurl ethics complaints. They are, essentially, the law of the land, and when they have a grievance there’s no higher power to appeal to. It’s a wonder we don’t expect that from them more often.

Taylor Nye ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in biological anthropology and intending to major in Latin American studies.