Brian Keith Hagedorn (born January 21, 1978)[2] is an American lawyer and a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, serving since 2019.
[4] Hagedorn was an attorney at the Milwaukee firm Foley & Lardner until 2009, when he was appointed as a law clerk to Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman.
As chief legal counsel, Hagedorn was a drafter of Walker's controversial Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill of 2011,[3] and, in 2014, he served as appointing authority for the defense counsel hired to represent state prosecutors sued by targets of a John Doe probe into Walker's staff.
Hagedorn took office on August 1, 2015 and replaced retiring Chief Judge Richard S. Brown, who had served on the Court of Appeals since it was created in 1978.
He has since come under criticism from his former Supreme Court colleague, conservative justice Daniel Kelly, who accused Hagedorn of trying to seek political neutrality when considering the implications of his rulings.
[13] In May 2020, Hagedorn dissented from the conservative majority's decision to invalidate Governor Tony Evers' stay-at-home order in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
[14] In March 2021, Hagedorn was in the Wisconsin Supreme Court's conservative majority that prevented Governor Tony Evers from extending a face mask mandate intended to halt the spread of the coronavirus.
"[21][22] In 2021, the Wisconsin Legislature and governor failed to agree on new redistricting maps to account for the 2020 United States census, so the issue fell to the courts, as had happened in 1982, 1992, and 2002.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court had only drawn legislative maps once in their history, in 1964, and that decision predated many of the federal laws which now govern redistricting.
Conservatives on the court, including Hagedorn, obliged the partisan request and assumed original jurisdiction on Johnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, taking on a redistricting case for the first time in nearly 60 years.
A short time later, Hagedorn rejoined the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select the Republican maps.
As expected, the new court majority took up a new redistricting case in 2023, examining a technical question about whether the maps violated the state constitution's requirement that districts be composed of "contiguous territory".
In a 4–3 decision along ideological lines, the liberal majority ruled in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission that the maps did violate the constitution and would need to be entirely redrawn.
[27] His dissent in Clarke represented a significant shift in his opinion from his vote in 2022 to assume jurisdiction over the Johnson redistricting case.