About
About Judge Blanchard.
Brian Blanchard is a judge on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals — District IV, where he has served since 2010. District IV covers Madison and the surrounding southern and western counties of Wisconsin.
Before joining the Court of Appeals, Blanchard served as the elected District Attorney of Dane County from 2001 to 2010. Earlier in his legal career, he worked as an Assistant United States Attorney handling criminal cases in the Northern District of Illinois, and as a law clerk for the Hon. Walter Cummings, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Before becoming a lawyer, Blanchard worked as a reporter at The Miami Herald for six years.
He was first elected to the Court of Appeals in 2010.
Featured Opinions
Notable opinions.
Mitchell v. Buesgen
Authored the majority. Blanchard ran into a Court of Appeals rule he questioned on the merits, but rather than working around it, he applied the binding rule and used a footnote to flag the issue for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reconsider. That is the right move: lower courts follow the rules they are bound by; the Supreme Court is the venue for changing them.
A prisoner filed a case past a deadline. There was a Court of Appeals rule on point that Blanchard thought was wrong. He had two options. He could try to work around the rule and reach the result he wanted. Or he could follow the rule and tell the Wisconsin Supreme Court that the rule needs another look. He picked option two. He followed the binding rule and used a footnote to flag the issue. That is exactly how an intermediate court should handle a rule it disagrees with—the higher court has the power to change rules, not the lower court.
Jahimiak
Joined the majority. Blanchard joined Judge Kloppenburg's opinion but explicitly bypassed an alternative ground—forfeiture—that would have resolved the case more easily. He insisted the panel decide on the narrowest legally sound basis. The instinct is to do less, not more.
In the same divorce-deadline case Kloppenburg wrote, Blanchard joined the result but explicitly skipped over an easier path the panel could have taken. The easier path would have ended the case on a small technical rule. Blanchard insisted on deciding the case on the actual legal question instead. That is the harder road, but it gives litigants a real answer instead of a procedural dodge.
State v. Ramirez and Hubbard v. Neuman panels
Sat on both panels. Blanchard was the only District IV judge to participate in both of the term's high-profile criminal cases—a signal of his central role in the rotation. His votes contributed to the Ramirez panel that the Wisconsin Supreme Court later reversed 5-2 and to the Hubbard panel the Supreme Court affirmed.
Blanchard was the only District IV judge who sat on both of the term's biggest criminal cases. He did not write the lead opinion in either case. But his vote was part of both. The Supreme Court reversed one panel and affirmed the other. On the panel court system, the third vote often decides which way a case lands—and Blanchard cast his vote on both of these.
