Q&A: ‘I make sure I get the facts right’: Susan Crawford makes her case for the Wisconsin Supreme Court

In an interview with The Daily Cardinal, Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford made her case for why she is best fit to serve on the court ahead of the April 1 election. 

Crawford has served as a Dane County circuit court judge since 2018. She was reelected in spring 2024 to serve a second six-year term on the court. 

Previously, Crawford served as chief legal counsel to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and as an attorney in various state roles, including assistant attorney general and director of criminal appeals with the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

As a private attorney, Crawford has represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin in a case challenging a ban on medical abortions in 2014. She also worked for the liberal law firm Pines Bach in Madison. 

Crawford is looking to maintain the court’s narrow liberal majority, while opponent Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican attorney general, seeks to swing Wisconsin’s high court back to conservatives. 

Whoever wins the April 1 election will serve a 10-year term on the court and will likely decide the shape of the court until conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley and Chief Justice Annette Ziegler are up for reelection in 2026 and 2027, respectively. 

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How have your experiences as a prosecutor, private-practice attorney and circuit court judge prepared you for a role on the Wisconsin Supreme Court?

All the experience that I bring to this race, from being a prosecutor — from standing up in court for people when the rights were taken away from them by the government, and now as a circuit court judge, making sure that I'm making fair decisions, applying the law and protecting people's rights every day — I think that's great preparation for me to be on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

My approach to making decisions as a judge is pretty straightforward. I make sure that I get the facts right, because the truth is a really important value in our justice system, and I make sure that I'm applying the law correctly after listening to the lawyers in the case make their presentations to me and tell me what they think and how they think the law should be interpreted. Ultimately, my job is to determine that, and then when I make a decision, to apply some common sense and make sure that the law is being applied to protect the rights of the people before me. 

I'd like to pivot to just say that my opponent in this race, Brad Schimel, is a longtime partisan politician with a pretty extreme agenda, and he is running this race for Wisconsin Supreme Court very much as if it were a partisan race…That's just not what the Supreme Court is for. It's there to protect the rights of all Wisconsinites under our laws and our Constitution, and that's why I'm running. 

Schimel has a background as Wisconsin’s attorney general, while you have served as a judge and attorney in multiple capacities. How do you think these different experiences shape your approach to the law?

When [Brad Schimel] was attorney general, he ran for that office as a Republican. It was a partisan race, and he not only ran as a partisan candidate, but he performed the job of attorney general with a really partisan agenda that I think is unlike any attorney general before or since. 

He was using the resources of that office to pursue a far-right agenda, doing things like spending taxpayer money to try to overturn the Affordable Care Act. If that had been successful, it would have resulted in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Wisconsinites losing their health insurance coverage. He also is a longtime opponent to reproductive health care rights for women and hired a top lawyer in his office who we now know was meeting secretly with conservative legal groups around the country to try to develop a legal strategy to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that didn't help any Wisconsinite either. At the same time, he was pursuing all these right-wing causes. 

As a partisan office holder, he was neglecting to do the things that the attorney general should be prioritizing for people. At that time, there was a huge backlog of untested sexual assault kits. Those are the kits that contain the DNA that can help us to figure out who the perpetrator is in those crimes. And out of 6,000 backlog tests, he only managed to get nine tested in two years, and that's because he didn't make it a priority. 

He also was one of just a couple of attorneys general in the whole country who refused to get into a national lawsuit to hold opioid manufacturers accountable for flooding our communities with addictive drugs and harming so many people's lives and so many families in Wisconsin. Brad Schimel didn't get Wisconsin into that lawsuit to hold those companies accountable. At the same time, he was taking more campaign contributions from pharmaceutical manufacturers than just about anybody else in Wisconsin.

Brad Schimel has positioned himself as a conservative judicial candidate. How do your personal views differ on issues such as voting rights, abortion rights and workers' rights?

I want voters to know that I work to protect the rights of voters, particularly vulnerable voters, people who are elderly and disabled. I have worked to protect the rights of voters like public school teachers when their rights were taken away from them. I've represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and their doctors when the government was trying to get between women and their doctors and make it harder for them to provide those necessary health care services. 

It's important for voters to know about that history and that experience, and at the same time, [know] I will be fair and impartial as a justice. I will keep an open mind and never make a decision until I've heard all the evidence. Until I've heard the lawyers tell me all their arguments about how the law should be applied, and then on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, it's also important to me that I hear the perspectives of the other justices before I make any decision. 

This upcoming election is expected to be highly partisan and expensive. How do you plan to maintain judicial impartiality in such a charged political environment? 

There's a lot of people and a lot of organizations that are following this race closely because the stakes are really high. The election is going to determine not just the future of our state, but also the future of every Wisconsinite's rights and freedoms. People should be paying attention to it. I know that there are, likewise, a lot of organizations paying into the race. 

Brad Schimel, as soon as he announced his candidacy way back in November of 2023 when he thought he was going to be running against the current retiring Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, immediately said that he was going to try to nationalize this race by bringing partisan politics into it, going out to get all of the national conservative groups that he had worked with when he was attorney general. 

What is one thing you want young voters to know about you? 

I want young voters to know that I am looking to protect their rights under our Constitution and under our state laws and make sure that their fundamental freedoms are protected. I encourage all of the young people who see this article to exercise their right to vote. One of the most important things that you can do as a citizen is to exercise your right to vote and say who you want to hold these really important jobs. 

I think that young voters need to know that Brad Schimel wants to take away your rights. He's in favor of having an 1849 [abortion] law, a law that was adopted in Wisconsin by an all-male Legislature before the Civil War. Schimel thinks that law should be adopted, or it should be enforced as an outright criminal ban on abortions in Wisconsin, with no exceptions for things like sexual assault or the health of the woman. I think young people should be concerned about a candidate who has an extreme position like that and is so willing to take rights away from people.

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