Wisconsin Judge Said to Have Attacked Colleague

CHICAGO — That the members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court were deeply divided has hardly been a secret of late. When the justices this month decided a law curtailing collective bargaining rights for public workers should come into effect, one of the dissenting justices openly accused the other side of a “partisan slant.”

But signs of a strong philosophical debate within the court reached a different level with a report published on Saturday suggesting that the argument had, shortly before the release of the ruling on collective bargaining, turned physical.

The report by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and Wisconsin Public Radio described an episode in which three unnamed sources said that Justice David T. Prosser had grabbed another justice, Ann Walsh Bradley, around the neck during an argument in her chambers this month.

Late Saturday, a separate Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report described a physical encounter in which two sources offered conflicting accounts of what happened, including one in which Justice Bradley was said to have charged at Justice Prosser.

“Once there’s a proper review of this matter, and the facts surrounding it are made clear, the anonymous claim made to the media will be proven false,” Justice Prosser said in a statement he released late Saturday. “Until then, I will refrain from further public comment.”

Justice Bradley could not be reached for comment, and officials from the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, which monitors judicial behavior and standards, did not return calls. The chief of the Wisconsin Capitol Police declined to comment for now.

Already, though, the report was stirring new divisions in a state that has, for months, been locked in a battle between Democrats and Republicans, and between union supporters and those who view cuts to collective bargaining as the only way to spare the state budget.

Critics of Justice Prosser were expressing outrage and calling for investigations into relations among members of the court. While most state Supreme Court justices are known only slightly beyond the legal world, Justice Prosser became well known to most Wisconsinites this year when his bid for re-election — ordinarily a routine, somewhat dull affair — turned into a referendum on the fight that was already playing out in Madison over union rights and public workers.

Justice Prosser, a former Republican leader of the State Assembly, had been accused by union supporters of being a sure vote for anti-union measures and other efforts by the Republican-dominated Legislature and the new governor, Scott Walker, a Republican. Justice Prosser said he had shed his partisan leanings in more than a decade on the state Supreme Court, and could not be lumped as the decisive conservative vote in what many have come to see as a predictable 4-to-3 conservative-liberal split.

Justice Prosser narrowly won re-election in April. And by this month, the court was hearing arguments in perhaps the most polarizing case of all: whether Governor Walker’s bill to cut bargaining rights and benefits for public workers had been passed in a legal manner. A lower court found that Republican lawmakers violated the state’s open-meetings provisions, but on June 14 the Supreme Court decided to reinstate the law. The vote: 4 to 3, along the conservative-liberal lines that many had expected.

Justice Prosser was with the majority, who cited the importance of the separation of powers and said the State Legislature had not violated the state’s Constitution when it relied on its interpretation of its rules and gave slightly less than two hours’ notice before meeting and voting for the collective bargaining rights cuts. Justice Bradley was among the dissenters, a group that also included Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson.

In her dissent, Chief Justice Abrahamson criticized Justice Prosser’s writing on the matter, saying, “It is long on rhetoric and long on storytelling that appears to have a partisan slant.”

In his re-election campaign, Justice Prosser acknowledged an earlier verbal run-in with Chief Justice Abrahamson in which he had, he said, called her a “total bitch.” In an interview with The New York Times, he explained his comments: “Did I say something I shouldn’t have said? Of course. Do I regret it? Of course. Do I apologize for it? Yes, I do.”

But in the interview, Justice Prosser also described great tension on the court. At least one of the justices had been recruiting candidates to run against him, Justice Prosser said.

“All of these things were coming to a head,” he said. “The members of the court were very, very deeply divided.”