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//end headline wrapper ?>Shirley Abrahamson. Jake Harper/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
“She belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices,”
Joe Ehmann, who runs the appellate division of the State Public Defender’s office in Madison, says of the late Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice
Shirley Abrahamson, who passed away on Saturday.
“I think of her and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the same way,” he adds. “I am in awe of and grateful for what each achieved in their extraordinary lives and careers, and miss them both.”
Dean Strang, a prominent criminal defense attorney who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court places Abrahamson, along with two or three other judges nationwide, as “the leading U.S. state supreme court judge of the second half of the 20th century and the first two decades of this one.”
Shirley Abrahamson, longest-serving member of Wisconsin Supreme Court, dies at 87 Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MADISON - Shirley Abrahamson crashed through barriers for women, but her son was only dimly aware of it as he was growing up.
Daniel Abrahamson was about 12 when his mother became the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1976. The significance didn t fully sink in at the time, he said Sunday.
“My understanding might have been stronger if she had carried it around with herself in a personal way,” he said. “Because she didn’t change at all, to me life didn’t change much at all other than we had a prime parking space on the Capitol square.