No Joking Matter, Legal Professionals Rate State Supreme Court Justice “Unqualified” and Less Than Satisfactory for “Character and Integrity” and “Fairness and Impartiality”

MADISON, Wis. — In a poll of attorneys conducted by the Dane County Bar Association Rebecca Bradley, Gov. Scott Walker’s thrice appointed State Supreme Court crony, received less than satisfactory ratings in critical areas of “character and integrity” and “fairness and impartiality.” Bradley’s abysmal ratings from legal professionals in Dane County comes on the heels of a survey of members of the Milwaukee County Bar Association in which a plurality of respondents ranked her “unqualified.”

One Wisconsin Now Research Director and attorney Jenni Dye commented, “With her words and actions Rebecca Bradley has shown she can’t be trusted to uphold the most basic principle of our legal system, that all are equal before the law. Based on their ratings, the professionals who work in our courts every day agree.”

Dane County Bar Association members were asked to complete an online poll rating the candidates for State Supreme Court and Dane County judicial races on criteria the association determined were important for a judge. The ratings were based on a 0 to 4 scale, with 0 for “No information,” 1 for “Unsatisfactory,” 2 for “Satisfactory,” 3 for “Good” and 4 for “Excellent. In critical areas of “character and integrity” and “fairness and impartiality,” Bradley failed to achieve even a “satisfactory” rating with average scores of 1.79 and 1.81 respectively.

The Milwaukee County Bar Association also conducted a survey of its membership and, as reported by the media, resulted in Bradley being rated “unqualified” for the state high court by a plurality of the legal professionals responding. According to the Milwaukee Bar, the ratings are based on a number of criteria like, “Integrity, including the ability to decide issues without regard to the identity of the parties or counsel …”

With three appointments in three years, Rebecca Bradley owes her judicial career to being Scott Walker’s biggest crony. Research by One Wisconsin Now has exposed Rebecca Bradley as a partisan Republican extremist who equated contraception with “murder” and advocating for allowing pharmacists the right to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions from doctors. She wrote that gay people are “queers” and “degenerates” and compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust. On the state’s high court she skipped out of oral arguments to make an appearance before the state’s big business lobby during which she pledged her fealty, declaring that she is their “public servant.”

Dye concluded, “It’s no joke when legal professionals rate a sitting state Supreme Court Justice as being ‘unqualified’ and failing to meet a satisfactory standard on qualifications like ‘fairness’ and ‘integrity’. In fact, it undermines access to fair and impartial justice in our state.”