//end headline wrapper ?>Shirley Abrahamson. Jake Harper/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
“She belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices,”
Joe Ehmann, who runs the appellate division of the State Public Defender’s office in Madison, says of the late Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice
Shirley Abrahamson, who passed away on Saturday.
“I think of her and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the same way,” he adds. “I am in awe of and grateful for what each achieved in their extraordinary lives and careers, and miss them both.”
Dean Strang, a prominent criminal defense attorney who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court places Abrahamson, along with two or three other judges nationwide, as “the leading U.S. state supreme court judge of the second half of the 20th century and the first two decades of this one.”
She was first woman and longest serving justice on Wisconsin Supreme Court. //end headline wrapper ?>Get a daily rundown of the top stories on Urban Milwaukee
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, shown here at a March 13, 2013, oral argument, took in the vast majority of donations from attorneys whose cases came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court over the past 11 years. Jake Harper/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Shirley Abrahamson, Wisconsin’s longest-serving Supreme Court justice, died Saturday at the age of 87.
Abrahamson announced in 2018 that she had cancer and would not be seeking another term as a Supreme Court justice. She retired from the court last year after serving for 43 years longer than any other Supreme Court justice in the state’s history. She was the sole woman serving on the court until 1993.
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Kathy and I were devastated this morning to learn of Chief Justice Abrahamson’s passing. Chief Justice Abrahamson was a first the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the first woman to serve as chief justice. Yet, her legacy is defined not just by being a first, but her life’s work of ensuring she would not be the last, paving and lighting the way for the many women and others who would come after her.
Serving more than 40 years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and writing more than 1,300 opinions, few others have given so much of themselves to the cause of public service in Wisconsin. Chief Justice Abrahamson was a meticulous jurist and a profound writer who believed in an independent judiciary. But she was also a champion for a more fair, more equitable state and country, and to that end, worked to hold our laws to account.