Noah Feldman, Columnist

Wisconsin Lockdown Ruling Shows Right Wing's Paranoia

It isn’t tyranny to try to stop a pandemic. Truly.

May 14, 2020 at 4:45 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

The framers were not overly concerned about the closure of taverns during plagues.
Photographer: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images

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In a fascinating, bizarre, only-in-America moment, a partisan majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court has struck down the stay-at-home order issued by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. There is no appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court from the state court’s 4-3 decision, because it’s based entirely on Wisconsin law. Although it probably won’t be replicated in other states, the decision tells you a lot about the state of judicial politics in the U.S. today — and how those politics interact with the developing partisan politics of the coronavirus pandemic.

The majority opinion is lawyerly — not in the admiring sense of the word favored only by lawyers, but in the pejorative sense of the term favored by ordinary human beings.