These are dark days for our democracy. We already faced significant barriers to realizing a truly representative Republic—the antiquated Electoral College, the antimajoritarian Senate filibuster, the corrupting Citizens United decision. Now, we confront election results that empower people openly hostile to our democratic institutions and contemptuous of the rule of law. It is no exaggeration to say that we face an effort, summarized in Project 2025, to turn the clock back more than a century to the Gilded Age, when government was captured to serve the interests of robber barons and oligarchs.
Law Forward will be part of the fight back. In that work, we take inspiration from Rebecca Solnit: “You don’t stop because there is no way forward… You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route.”
Importantly, we recognize and seize upon the fact that our situation here in Wisconsin provides opportunities for progress. With a newly revitalized state Supreme Court, we are in a better position here than most places to protect our democracy and even to make gains in advancing our bedrock democratic values. And Wisconsin, uniquely among all states, has in Law Forward existing legal infrastructure focused entirely on defending and advancing democracy in our state. We intend to lean into these advantages.
Law Forward will continue working to repair the harm the gerrymander has wrought on Wisconsin. This includes our ongoing efforts to unwind the union-busting Act 10 legislation as a violation of our state constitution, but it also means taking steps to challenge the unconstitutional constraints that our legislature has imposed on our public schools and our local governments. Draconian funding formulas starve our schools, the foundation of an informed electorate and a healthy democracy, of the funds they need. And creeping legislative overreach has strangled municipal efforts to provide essential public services and solve local problems. In both instances, breathing life into the Wisconsin Constitution and vindicating its guarantees can help fix these fundamental problems.
Law Forward will also seek to flip the script on voting rights by filing an affirmative case to define the right to vote in our state. The Wisconsin Constitution, unlike its federal counterpart, contains express provisions guaranteeing the right to vote, but our courts have never articulated the boundaries of what that right protects. An affirmative ruling on voting rights would staunch the ever-intensifying flood of anti-voter lawsuits that has become an election-year ritual.
Law Forward will work to restore functional state government in Wisconsin. The legislature has broken the process of normal regulatory rulemaking essential for working government in our modern world. It has added choke points to an already-extensive process, with the effect of blocking state agencies from meeting their statutory obligations to act in the public interest. We intend to push back and restore workable law in this area, both by bringing affirmative litigation and by resisting lawsuits filed to further disable regulatory bodies in Wisconsin.
With one foot in front of the other, we can walk a new path into being here in Wisconsin. “We need to be unstoppable,” Rebecca Solnit teaches. With your help, we intend to be just that. – Jeff Mandell
“The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.”
“You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.”
— excerpted from Rebecca Solnit, “Too Soon To Tell” (2013)