Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2007 and reelected in 2017. On May 1, 2021, she was chosen by members of the Court to serve as chief justice and served as chief justice until April 30, 2025. She is the 80th justice and the sixth woman to serve on the state's highest court since Wisconsin became a state in 1848. To read her full biography, click here.
Annette Kingsland Ziegler is a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where she has served since August 2007. She held the role of Chief Justice from May 2021 to April 2025. She is the 80th justice and the sixth woman to serve on the state's highest court since Wisconsin became a state in 1848.
Before joining the Supreme Court, Ziegler served for a decade as a Washington County Circuit Court Judge. Earlier in her career, she worked as a federal prosecutor — an Assistant United States Attorney handling criminal cases in the Eastern District of Wisconsin — and as an attorney in private practice.
Ziegler was first elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April 2007 and re-elected to a second ten-year term in 2017. Her current term runs through 2027.
Composite combines the 5-metric methodology score (50%) with critical-cases alignment (50%) per the IRG Court Watch scoring framework. Read the full methodology →
Justice Ziegler's 2024–25 methodology centers on institutional stability and structural formalism. She relies on contemporaneous dictionaries—including 1850 and 1851 sources in Kaul v. Wisconsin State Legislature and Lemieux v. Evers—to recover original public meaning, and applies the whole-act rule to harmonize statutory text. Her separation-of-powers writing distinguishes executive negation (the partial veto in its traditional form) from affirmative lawmaking, and her dissents warn against legislative subdelegation to administrative agencies. She authored the WEC v. LeMahieu majority applying Prehn despite her personal disagreement with that precedent, citing the absence of any party request to overrule it. She uses the avoidance canon and the DIG mechanism selectively, intervening when she views a question as one of statewide importance.
“The majority opinion is a jaw-dropping exercise of judicial will, placing personal preference over the constitutional roles of the three branches of our state government and upending a duly enacted law.”
“Statutes are to be interpreted in a manner that ‘ensures a text’s manifest purpose is furthered, not hindered.’”
“Nothing in the text of § 803.08 gives a court any authority to conduct a preliminary inquiry into the merits of a suit in order to determine whether it may be maintained as a class action.”
“It is the court\u2019s duty to adhere to the law whether we \u201Clike\u201D the answer or not. A judge\u2019s personal preferences are not legal analysis and should not supplant it.”
“‘[S]tatutory interpretation begins with the language of the statute.’ But ‘[w]hen the legislature has expressly stated the purpose of a statute, the purpose is relevant to the plain meaning interpretation of the statute.’”
“Instead of protecting the employment of employees, the Act, as the court interprets and applies it, promotes the premature firing of employees suspected of committing offenses. Stated otherwise, the court renders the Act self-defeating in factual situations like these.”
“The outcome of this case turns the stated purpose of the Act upside down—pushing employers to terminate employees as quickly as possible to avoid the risk of liability under the Act. The legislature did not intend the statute to operate in this manner.”
“The wrongful deference the majority gives to LIRC’s factual findings in this case demonstrates the unlikelihood that courts will reverse a finding by LIRC that an employer terminated an employee because of the employee’s arrest record.”
“It is well established that an evaluation of the merits of the underlying dispute is not a proper consideration when determining whether class certification is appropriate.”
“Although I agree with the majority that the court of appeals must be reversed, I disagree with the majority’s decision to address DOC’s other arguments, arguments on which the court of appeals never opined. I would, instead, remand this case to the court of appeals to address those arguments in the first instance.”