THE ISTHMUS DESIGNS COVER WITHOUT READING OWN COVER STORY
HEADER READS "BRADLEY V. KLOPPENBURG IS A CLASSIC CONTEST BETWEEN TWO VISIONS OF THE ROLE OF LAW”
STORY EXPLAINS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE
The Isthmus’ cover story this week is a hit job on conservative judge Rebecca Bradley, who is the incumbent running for State Supreme Court. And that’s totally fine - Bradley is just another puppet for business interests. She’s hoping to be elected on the strength of her appeal to Christian fundamentalists and the white population’s widespread racism, so that she can help the court pave a legal path for the neoliberal agenda advanced by Scott Walker.
I mean, there are problems with the article - it accepts an insulated political framework where “liberal” will always mean “Not Republican” - but we can talk about that later, Isthmus. For now, can we just talk about the cover?
This is not “a classic contest between two visions of the role of law”. Did you find some sort of niche automatic headline generator online? A clash between “two visions of the role of law” is exactly the way Bradley is trying to frame the race. Her whole thing is to claim she’s above politics and has a different judicial philosophy than Kloppenberg, so that people won’t think about her actual politics when they vote. The whole point of the article is to debunk that framework. Quote: “The race...might ultimately come down to... Who has the most money from those seeking to sway the court’s ideological tilt.”
Bradley’s framing of this as a conflict over “role of law” is just a tried and true method that “gives conservative judges a fig leaf to cover their activism”, notes legal historian Melvin Urofsky. I didn’t interview Urofsky; that quote is from the article.
What’s going on here? Does whoever designed the cover disagree with the person who wrote the article? If so, this is a strange, although possibly effective, way of getting revenge.
The real takeaway is as follows.
“The Isthmus: You can do politics without even thinking about it!”
