Annette Ziegler

2007 election

Ziegler faced Madison attorney Linda Clifford in the April 2007 general election, after they were the top two finishers in the February primary. The campaign was contentious. Ziegler asserted that Clifford's lack of judicial experience made her ill-prepared for the Supreme Court; she also raised concerns about two of Clifford's campaign workers misrepresenting themselves to law enforcement officials. Clifford asserted that Ziegler had ruled in cases where she had a clear conflict of interest.^[2]

It came to light during the campaign that Ziegler had ruled on roughly a dozen cases affecting a bank of which her husband was a paid board member, and on 22 cases involving companies in which Ziegler personally owned more than $50,000 of stock.^[3]

On April 3, 2007, Ziegler defeated Clifford in the election, 58% to 42%.^[4] Her campaign and allies outspent Clifford $4.1 million to $1.7 million. The influential business lobbying associations Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and Wisconsin Club for Growth spent $2.6 million in support of Ziegler.

Following her election, in a 5–1 decision the Wisconsin Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of publicly reprimanding Ziegler for willful violations of the code of judicial conduct by presiding over those cases where she had an apparent conflict of interest.^[5]

Tenure

In 2015, Ziegler joined the four-justice majority that ended the John Doe investigation into possibly illegal coordination between the 2010 gubernatorial campaign of Scott Walker and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and Wisconsin Club for Growth. The court ruled that such coordination, if it had occurred, would be legal. The sweeping ruling upended Wisconsin campaign finance rules, enabling close coordination between campaigns and political action committees, which do not have to disclose their donors.^[6]

In 2017, she joined a 5–2 decision to strike down a rule that would have required judges to recuse from cases where they had received lawful campaign contributions from one of the interested parties.^[7]

Ziegler was reelected in 2017 without opposition. Her second term expires on July 31, 2027.

In 2021, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, then 80 years old, declined to seek another two-year term as chief justice. On April 14, 2021, Ziegler's colleagues elected her as the next chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, effective May 1, 2021.^[8] Ziegler is the second chief justice to be elected by her colleagues since the constitution was amended to establish this selection process.^[9]

Zeigler is generally regarded as part of the court's conservative wing.^[10]

Since the swearing-in of Janet Protasiewicz in 2023 and the emergence of a liberal majority on the Court, Ziegler has come into frequent conflict with her more liberal colleagues, whom she accuses of judicial activism and staging a "coup".^[11] This criticism was the main focus of her vehement dissent in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, in which she wrote that the majority (often referred to in the dissent as the "court of four") "takes a wrecking ball to the law, making no room, nor having any need, for longstanding practices, procedures, traditions, the law, or even their co-equal fellow branches of government. Their activism damages the judiciary as a whole."^[12]

Retirement

On March 9, 2026, Ziegler announced that she would not run for re-election in the 2027 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and would leave office at the end of her present term.^[13]

Wisconsin Circuit Court (1998, 2004)

Wisconsin Supreme Court (2007, 2017)