I am Roman, really when you get stuff.
All right, great.
Well Judge Lazar, thanks for coming in today.
Thank you for having me.
So let's start with your judicial philosophy.
How would you describe it, and how does it guide you
from the bench?
I describe my philosophy as originalism
with a slice of textualism, which
means for those who are not law nerds like me, which
means that I look at the documents and the laws as they're
written, and I interpret them from that point of view.
And if you have to go a little bit outside, I do.
But I don't go all the way outside to intent of legislators
and things like that.
So obviously, this race is now an open seat,
because Justice Bradley decided not to run again.
What was your first thoughts when she announced she was not
going to do that?
Well, it was a surprise.
My thoughts were that I looked at the last election,
and I thought that it was so politicized for the people
in the state of Wisconsin that I thought they actually
could use a judge or a justice like me who
someone who is calm, judicial, has the experience,
and will not legislate from the bench.
Has she given you any guidance?
Have you reached out to her about what
it's like to run for Supreme Court?
I've talked to several of the past justices.
I've talked to anyone who will talk to me,
and actually more people talk to me than you would think.
How much money is going to be needed to win this race?
I'm not positive on that.
I know it will not be anywhere close to last year.
So in what way?
How is this different from, I guess, the last two races
when control of the court was up for grabs?
Well, that's one thing.
I think what I meant by not being anywhere close,
I think the numbers were bigger because it
would have changed the composition of the court.
This time, we're talking about a position that
is going to be most likely in the minority,
but someone who will stand up to be
a strong voice for the common sense people of my home state.
So some of the early fundraising totals came out,
and you've raised about 200,000.
You're opponent close to 2 million.
Some people raised their eyebrows at that,
but you got into this race after her,
and you're trying to, I guess, fight your way
into an oxygen-starved environment
when it comes to fundraising.
So what's it been like for you?
Well, that's true.
So I started on October 1.
So I think the numbers actually are relatively good
for starting that late.
Also, since January, which was the cutoff date, January 1,
we've had a big ground swell of support from people
who've recognized and actually heard about this race
and realized there is no primary,
and they've looked at it and they've said this is a race
and a candidate they're interested in supporting.
Do you expect to have the Republican Party of Wisconsin
make a donation to your campaign to help along the way?
You know, I anticipate they might.
Any party, any group that wants to do so, they can do that.
I'm not, I can't as a judge.
We don't ethically ask for money,
but if groups are gonna do that,
I have not said I would not accept.
And we've seen in past elections,
Justice Protezaitz, for example,
received a large amount from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
She said during that election,
she would recuse herself from any cases
in which the Democratic Party was a plaintiff.
Would you do the same or how would you,
how do you handle fundraising and recusal process?
Well, fundraising and recusal, I am very strict.
I follow the rules set by the US Supreme Court
as well as by the state of Wisconsin.
I've had to look at different circumstances
and decide when and how to recuse.
And I always look at not only is it objectively,
but subjectively biased.
So if there's an appearance of impropriety,
then I will take a step back.
We've seen in some more recent examples,
some of the former Justice Gableman
has asked a number of members of the bench to recuse.
In some other cases, it seems like it's
being thrown out as a normal course of action.
So what should the public take
from the Wisconsin Supreme Court's recusal rule
when more and more people are asking them
to sit out some of these high profile cases?
And in some cases, they are not,
and I guess in Justice Agadorn's case
and the Act 10 case, he did.
Well, excuse me, recusal is a very interesting circumstance.
It's really internally what a judge believes
that they have to do to be not only fair and impartial,
but to appear that way.
I think maybe people are seeing it more.
Recusal happens all the time.
I was on the circuit court bench, on the court of appeals.
People always have those issues,
and I think they'll continue on the state Supreme Court.
So when you look at the last two elections,
is that impacted morale for the number of people
paying attention to this race,
or perhaps for people getting behind your campaign
and seeing, well, the last two conservative candidates
lost in rather large fashion?
I don't know if it's impacted morale.
What I will say is this.
I think that the state of Wisconsin
is looking at these races and they're asking,
who's running and why people are running and for what reason?
And when I look at this race,
the reason I am running is because I want to be someone
on that court who represents the law
for the state of Wisconsin.
I want to be someone who is their voice,
bringing diversity of thought and judicial backgrounds
and experience to that court.
I don't look at those past races
as anything indicative of what's gonna happen.
In fact, I'm kind of hoping that there's gonna be a line
in the Sandron now where we can look forward and say,
who's the better judicial candidate?
Who has more experience?
And I think in this race, it's pretty clear
that that's my candidacy.
When you compare the records of the two candidates here,
you're both circuit court judges.
You're both now in the appellate court.
So how do you explain to the public
the difference in your background?
Well, numbers, numbers are the reason.
So I spent 20 years in private practice.
I spent five years at the Department of Justice
representing the state of Wisconsin.
But I spent seven years in the circuit court
in every branch, criminal, civil, juvenile,
mental commitments.
My opponent spent two years in criminal.
I've spent four years on the court of appeals,
published many written opinions.
My opponent has spent two.
I think when you add up the numbers,
it's pretty clear who has the judicial and legal experience.
Obviously, there's a pretty high profile race
for governor also kicking off right now.
When we talk about that oxygen starvation
of people paying attention,
how do you cut through to let people know,
hey, this race is really important?
Well, you're right.
My race is April, April 7th.
And all the other races are in November.
I think since I've been on the circuit court
and the court of appeals,
I have continually gone to my 12 counties
and anywhere else, including Milwaukee,
to talk to people, to talk to high school kids,
college kids about the courts,
about why it's so important.
And I do that all the time.
So I think this is just a continuation of telling people
why this race is so important.
It's in April because it's nonpartisan.
And it's in April because
that's how Wisconsin legislature is determined to be.
We've seen in the past couple of races,
candidates talk more about their own personal values
versus issues.
And that's a change compared to races in prior decades.
How are you talking about your values versus issues?
And what does that mean to the public
when they're listening and they wanna hear
maybe more clues to what you actually feel
or how you might rule,
even though that's obviously not what
you're supposed to be talking about.
So you mentioned two things that are really important.
So how I might rule is never an issue
and no judge, no justice, no candidate should ever say that.
But we've looked at the rules
and we've looked at the ethical rules
and we've determined that it's possible
to tell the state of Wisconsin more information
about where I stand, what I stand up for
and what issues I believe are important
and how I view the law, how I interpret the law,
what my philosophies are.
So on my website, you can go there,
judgemarielazar.com, you can go there
and it has my positions on important issues
that are set there written in black and white
so people can see it, can see what I stand for.
I don't say how I will rule on a case
but I say what I believe is important.
Is that frustrating when you speak to people
that are potentially voters who they wanna hear more,
they wanna hear you talk like a politician
because they think of these races more political
as opposed to an independent judicial race.
They do and in some respects,
I'll go places where there will be politicians speaking
and it's always that interesting dichotomy
between the calm demeanor of a judge
versus the politician who's yelling at the room
and screaming at everybody.
But I think that's what people want.
They want their judges not to be someone
who's yelling with their hair on fire in the room.
They want someone they think they would like
to have adjudicate their cases.
So when I go and talk to people,
I explain to them that I can't tell them
how I'll rule on case A versus B
but I do tell them here's how I rule,
here's how I respect people in my court,
here's what I think of victim's rights.
Those sort of things, I think that gets across the people
they recognize that there are certain limits
and that were bound by those limits or we should be.
Looking at some of the most recent cases
over the other races over the last decade,
the last one that seems to fit this parallel
and tell me if you agree is just as Haggadorn's race
where it was a little under the radar,
towards the end of the race,
there were a lot of people that wrote him off
as saying there's no way he can win
but it was a big ground game and he ended up winning
that race when most people had written him off.
Do you, do you see a similarity there?
Well secretly yes.
So the parallels are there.
I think that through my entire career,
people have underestimated me.
It's sort of been a theme that they don't think someone,
a little shorter, a little softer spoken
can be as strong as steel and I am.
And in this race, I think that's important too.
People think that, you know, it's written off,
it's a done deal and it's not.
This is a race where the people in the state of Wisconsin
have to take a step back and say,
who do we want on this court?
Do we want a legislator who is going to tell you
in the state what you have to do
or do we want to judge who has devoted her entire life
to representing the law?
A lot of people get focused on the fundraising numbers
and the millions of dollars
but how important is get out the vote?
And can this be a trial run for people
that are going to be doing get out the vote activities
all through the summer and into the fall?
I really don't look at what's going on legislatively
and what they're going to do.
I will say I do look at this as the 250th anniversary
of our country and I'm really excited
that this election will be happening in this year
and that when I win in August,
I get to have my investiture in the 250th anniversary year.
As to get out the vote, I think that everywhere I go,
I talk to people, all different groups,
people who are on one side or the other,
in fact, even people who hate everybody.
And I talk to all of those groups
and I get them to the point where they recognize
why this race is important and why I'm going to win.
So most of candidates for Supreme Court over the last few
have come strictly from the judiciary.
There've been a couple of examples
of those of partisan backgrounds.
Brad Schimmel obviously was the attorney general.
Justice David Prosser had a history in the assembly.
Your opponent has a history in the assembly.
How much should that factor in
when people are looking at whether a judge may
politicize something as their ruling?
Well, I think it factors in a lot.
I think that David Prosser was in a different generation,
a different time where people did come
from different avenues and some from the legal profession
or teaching instead of just being a legislator or a lawyer.
But I think now we're seeing people that are so partisan
and my opponent was a legislator from Madison.
My opponent was appointed by Tony Evers to the Circuit Court.
I've never been a member of a political party.
I've never been appointed to any position.
I've won all of my seats by running elections
and running and winning my elections.
I think it's really important when you look at that
and you compare and contrast the two of us,
our experience as well as where we come from.
What would you say is one of the most important
Supreme Court Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions
over the last five years?
So last five years.
That's really hard to say.
I guess perhaps, well, let's see.
So I know that they've made rulings
on issues with respect to mental commitments.
I know that those have been very important to people.
I know that they just issued an opinion just about a week
or two ago about privacy rights and people who
have Instagram accounts and things like that.
I think those are the cases that the State Supreme Court
is doing that are really important.
And I don't think that people in the states see them.
They look at more of the political cases
and the election area cases.
But it's those down and important to us standards of law.
There is another one about criminal burdens of proof
for termination of parental rights cases.
Those are the things that I think are really important.
It's interesting to bring up the Snapchat case
because I read that decision.
And what struck me is something we covered in last year's
Supreme Court election and that judges from the bench
often, if they're going to run for a higher office,
have to be concerned that any decision they make from the bench
can be used against them in a campaign commercial,
where there's no room for nuance.
So when justices are looking at something
dealing with someone who's been accused of, I guess,
watching child porn for lack of a better term on Snapchat,
could there have been any other outcome?
Or is the public nuanced enough to understand a distinction
about privacy rights when something that high profile gets
attached to that topic of that subject?
So you're saying that the judge who authored the opinion,
whether that or a film?
No, I guess all the way down from the Circuit Court bench
through the appellate process to the Supreme Court,
could there have been another outcome?
Or do you think, because it had to do with something so
disgusting as child porn, that could over inflame
the way people viewed that case or that decision?
All right, no, I really don't.
I think that if you go back and now I'm going to be wrong,
maybe 10, 15 years to the US Supreme Court cases,
Riley, and Carpenter, and other cases like that,
that talk about the fact that our cell phones
are actually file cabinets.
And when the founder has created the,
and drafted the Constitution, the Bill of Rights,
they talk about searches and seizures,
they obviously didn't think about your cell phone.
So it wasn't a question of what's in your cell phone
is it good or bad.
It could be that you're talking about an alibi.
It could be you're talking about selling drugs.
It could be the child porn situation.
So I don't think that that was necessarily the key.
The reason that was important in the GASPER case, which
is the case you're talking about,
was that it was something where there are algorithms that
determine that it was child porn.
And that was turned over to the Attorney General's office
and law enforcement to then go and look and get the warrants
to look at what was there.
I think if it was something else,
they may not have noticed it because there
are certain algorithms.
But the issues of privacy are so important with our cell phones.
They are really everything we own in our lives
is now in our hands.
And I think that's an important issue.
And I know the public understands that.
And they should understand that as well.
I want to run through some high profile cases
just to get your opinion on how you might have ruled
if you've been on the bench.
So most recently, the congressional redistricting
lawsuit, Bathfield versus WEC, creating the three judge
panels, what do you think of that decision?
Well, so that's an opinion that could come up in front.
I did release something on my website that talks about redistricting
and that it's supposed to only happen
once every tenure cycle with the United States Census.
So in that respect, I think that my position is pretty clear.
You do this once you don't get two or three kicks.
However, what they're going to do and what they're going to say,
I have no position on.
And you might be on the court.
I might be on the court.
So I would not have a position as to what that would be.
Another case from last year is Planned Parenthood
versus Ermansky.
It was a 4-3 decision to invalidate Wisconsin's 1849
abortion law.
How would you have ruled on that?
I'm not going to say how I would rule,
but I will say what I will do moving forward.
And I have put that in positions.
I've released a statement.
I've released an op-ed talking about abortion
and indicating that this is a really complicated issue
for the woman.
And her life is so valuable and important.
And I've indicated that one, I respect the rule
as decided by the State Supreme Court.
I will only be one of three members in the minority,
so I won't be changing that.
And two, I think women in the state need clarity.
They need certainty.
And three, you need to lower the temperature on this issue.
This is resolved, as far as I'm concerned,
for courts, for the judiciary.
The legislature can do what they want,
and the people in the state of Wisconsin
can do what they want.
But the judiciary, it's clear, it's done.
Another series of high-profile decisions
comes from Evers versus Mark Line,
and rebalancing some of the power
between the executive and the legislative branch.
The JCRAR was a four to one and two concurrences.
It was kind of a mixed message,
but that and also the null stewardship,
it was a six-one decision.
What do you think of those decisions?
Kind of trying to redraw the line
and refigure the modern interpretation
of that balance of power.
And that's a difficult question,
because I actually had some cases
that went up on the same sort of issues.
And I think that the separation of powers
is so important, and I follow in line with the views
of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch
and his view on what the separation of powers are
and how they fall.
I see this court maybe going a little astray
from that view, but again,
I'm going to be on the minority on this court.
So while I'll be writing a dissent or not,
I'm not the person who's going to change anything
that's happened.
And I really can't comment further
because I'm sure there'll be more coming up the pipe line.
And another case that's going back a few years now
is Trump versus Biden from the 2000 election
seeking to invalidate more than 200,000 votes
from Dane and Milwaukee counties.
That was a four, three decision
on whether they should take the case.
On standing.
On standing and decide, then go forward,
not actually how they would have ruled on that,
but what was your interpretation
of the decision of the court at that time?
Well, standing goes back all the way
to the Teigen case as well and talking about
who has standing and taxpayer standing
and not in this case it would have been taxpayer,
but voter standing.
This is sort of an area that's really deeply in flux
with our state Supreme Court.
They have issued several opinions
that have gone around the edges of it.
And so I'm not going to comment any further
on where they would go because I honestly believe
that standing is going to come back up in our next term.
So when I'm on this court, I don't want to have someone say,
you said in an interview, so now you can't rule on this case.
Okay.
As far as whether someone's going to say,
well, you didn't answer the question.
Trump, the Biden, would you have overturned all those votes?
Can you give me a reaction to that?
Well, I have answered the question,
but with respect to overturning votes,
I strongly believe that every vote should be counted.
So every legal valid vote should be counted.
So I wouldn't comment and I don't actually know
the parameters of how they were going to try
to disenfranchise or not disenfranchise voters.
So I really don't have any further thing
that I can say about that case.
When it comes to precedent,
you've mentioned a couple of times that if you win,
you would be in the minority,
but that's not a forever thing as we've seen.
The court can change.
What is the standard when it comes to overruling precedent?
Well, so people have to understand that precedent means
that you don't, just because the court changes composition,
you don't necessarily go back
and then revisit things you've just done.
precedent is that you respect,
you give stare decisces, it's a credit and it's a benefit
to cases that have been done and you give them time
to maybe air, to be looked at.
When courts have overturned precedent,
the US Supreme Court in general,
it's something that's maybe 20, 30 years down the road.
It's not something that they just do willy-nilly
as Scalia would say.
It's something that you have to have seen
that it doesn't work.
You can't just say, I'm now the member of the majority,
so everything that was done, I get to undo.
That's not how courts work.
We need to restore the respect and integrity in those courts
and have them move forward and not always be looking back
to things that they want to change.
We saw earlier, sorry, last year,
a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge
who was actually tried in federal court
for her interfering with an ICE operation in the courthouse.
What is the advice that would be given
to both judges and the public
when it comes to understanding the rules,
no matter their personal feelings,
on the interactions with federal agents and the courthouse?
Wow, well, I'm not really sure what the rules are
for interacting.
I would just say that you always have to respect,
you have to respect law enforcement,
you have to make sure, though, however,
that they have valid warrants,
that they have valid circumstances.
And I think the Hannah Dugan case
that you're talking about, the interesting thing there
and the thing that I think everyone misses
is this really was an excellent example
of how great our jury system is.
This jury looked at it deeply, they were impartial,
they made a decision, they asked a lot of questions.
And then when it was all said and done,
they came up with a decision that showed
that they really dealt in depth with what was going on
and they gave their decision
as to what we have to do with dealing with other law enforcement.
Sometimes you have to ask supervisors,
ask other people, find out what the rules are
and I don't know what they all are
with that respect in courthouses.
We work in a separate building, it's not a courthouse.
There's obviously a lot of controversy
over ICE's engagements in Minnesota right now,
there's speculation that that could be moving to Wisconsin.
What role would the Wisconsin court system have
when we've heard some local law enforcement say
they will not work with federal officials?
Some say they will work with,
when it comes to protesters' rights,
how do you see Wisconsin courts getting involved in this
or is this strictly a federal issue?
It is a federal issue.
In the circumstances, you never want to see anyone injured
or lose their life, that's a tragedy
in all respects in every case.
But I think that cooler heads have to prevail,
there is a right to First Amendment freedom of speech,
but I also believe that this is an excellent example
of why we need our courts, in this case,
it's probably federal courts,
but why we need our courts to be fair, impartial,
and independent to look at the facts,
to make a reasoned, calm decision,
and to do so fairly unjustly.
And there was a statement by the FBI Director Cash Patel
over the weekend saying you can't bring a firearm
loaded to any kind of protest that you want.
I want to get your legal reaction
to whether that is a true statement
in the sense of the First Amendment and the Second Amendment.
I would have no idea what those rules are with regard
to federal rules about bringing a firearm.
I think you're violating possibly the Second Amendment
where people have the right to conceal carry,
their right to open carry.
I wouldn't comment on his statement at all whatsoever.
Okay, and finally, will you seek Donald Trump's endorsement?
We saw Brad Schimmel go out and ask for that
towards the end of his campaign.
I'm not seeking endorsements of anyone
who's out of the state of Wisconsin.
If someone looks at my campaign and they agree
with my vision, my idea that we need to restore justice
and integrity to the Wisconsin State Supreme Court,
I would welcome the discussion,
but I'm not seeking anything.
All right, Judge Lazar, thanks for your time.
Thank you very much.
It was a pleasure.
Great.
Well, thanks for sitting down.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
You're still tethers.
I don't want to have too fast.
I would have gotten up.
Oh, yep, they just want to get some,
the sound of the room.
So walk.
Don't tap my shoes.
That should be good.
It's great.
We can get an inset shot.