Lynn Adelman
Lynn Steven Adelman is an American lawyer and former politician. He has served as a United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin since December 1997. Prior to becoming a federal judge, he served 20 years as a Democratic member of the Wisconsin Senate, representing southwest Milwaukee County and neighboring municipalities from 1977 to 1997. He also ran three times for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, 1982, and 1984.
Early life and education
Adelman was born in Milwaukee. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University in 1961 and a Bachelor of Laws from Columbia Law School in 1965.Career
Adelman was a research assistant at Columbia from 1965 to 1966. He was a trial attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Wisconsin from 1967 to 1968, and then entered private practice in Milwaukee in 1968. In 1993, Adelman represented Todd Mitchell, a black man convicted of a racially motivated attack against a 14-year old white boy, in Wisconsin v. Mitchell, a landmark first amendment case.Political career
Adelman made his first bid for elected office in 1974, running for U.S. House of Representatives and seeking to oust ten-term Republican incumbent Glenn Robert Davis from Wisconsin's 9th congressional district. Davis, who was a close ally of then-president Richard Nixon, was politically wounded by the Watergate scandal and Nixon's other recent controversies. Adelman focused much of his campaign on issues of executive overreach and the need for Congress to re-assert its authority. Davis, however, was defeated in the Republican primary by moderate Republican Bob Kasten. The general election was one of the most hotly-contested in the state, with both campaigns breaching campaign finance limits that had existed at that time—Adelman spent about $104,000 and Kasten spent about $89,000. Kasten defeated Adelman with 52% of the vote.In the aftermath of the election, Adelman was critical of some of Kasten's early votes in Congress and seemed intent on a rematch in 1976. Rather than running again for Congress in 1976, Adelman moved south from Shorewood, Wisconsin—in northern Milwaukee County—to New Berlin, Wisconsin—in southeast Waukesha County. The move immediately sparked speculation that Adelman would instead run for Wisconsin Senate against Republican incumbent James Devitt in the 28th Senate district. Shortly after Adelman's move, newspapers broke the story that Devitt was the subject of a John Doe investigation relating to campaign finance violations during his run for governor in 1974. Adelman officially announced his candidacy in June 1976. Devitt was indicted a month later. Despite the indictment, Devitt won renomination against two Republican challengers. Adelman won the general election in a landslide, receiving nearly two thirds of the vote.
While serving his second term in the state Senate, Adelman made two more runs for U.S. House of Representatives—the 1980s redistricting had shifted Adelman from the 9th congressional district to the 4th district. In the first election under those new maps, Adelman launched a primary challenge against 17-term incumbent congressman Clement Zablocki. Zablocki had not had a competitive primary or general election since winning the office in 1948. In the campaign, Adelman sought to tie Zablocki to the economic policies of the Reagan administration in the midst of the early 1980s recession. Zablocki was sometimes seen as too conservative for his safely Democratic district, but he fended off the criticisms and distanced himself from Reagan, winning the primary with 60% of the vote.
Zablocki died just a year later and Adelman made another run in the special election to succeed him in the spring of 1984. He lost the primary to state senator Jerry Kleczka—another popular Polish Catholic from Milwaukee's south side.
Adelman went on to win re-election four more times in the 28th Senate district. Through much of his tenure in the Senate, he served on the committee overseeing the judiciary, and was chairman in the years when Democrats held the majority.
Federal judicial service
In 1997, Adelman chose to apply for appointment as U.S. district judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin to fill the vacancy created when district judge Thomas John Curran took senior status at the beginning of that year. He was one of nineteen applicants, which included nine other state judges, two U.S. magistrate judges, and prominent state attorneys, including Maxine Aldridge White, Joan F. Kessler, and the then-chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin Mark Sostarich. Adelman's application rose above the others as state Republicans embraced his candidacy and Republican then-governor Tommy Thompson wrote a glowing recommendation, describing Adelman as "thoughtful, fair, and open-minded." Newspapers at the time speculated that Republican praise for Adelman was at least partly motivated by their desire to flip his seat in a special election and thereby regain the majority in the state Senate.Adelman was nominated to the seat by President Clinton on September 8, 1997. He received a hearing by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on October 29, 1997. He was confirmed by the full United States Senate by voice vote on November 13, 1997, and received his commission on December 23, 1997.
Notable cases
''Frank, et al vs Walker''
The Wisconsin Voter ID law was a law passed by then Wisconsin governor Scott Walker in 2011. This law made voters of Wisconsin show a state-issued photo ID at the polls before they could vote. The reasoning behind this law was that Scott Walker wanted to stop the voter fraud that was allegedly happening within the state of Wisconsin. Adelman ruled, on April 29, 2014, that this law violated the fourteenth amendment and thus the law was unconstitutional. Adelman made this ruling because in the trial he saw no evidence of voter fraud and concluded that the law was unfair to minority voters because "Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to lack an ID".Adelman was overturned on appeal with the Appeals Court offering a particularly stunning rebuke:
“the district judge found as a fact that the majority of the Supreme Court was wrong about benefits such as better record keeping and promoting public confidence. Maybe that testimony will eventually persuade the Justices themselves, but in our hierarchical judicial system a district court cannot declare a statute unconstitutional just because he thinks that the dissent was right and the majority wrong.” The Panel continued: “The district judge heard from one political scientist, whose view may or may not be representative of the profession's. After a majority of the Supreme Court has concluded that photo ID requirements promote confidence, a single district judge cannot say as a “fact” that they do not, even if 20 political scientists disagree with the Supreme Court.”