Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty

The organization has defended right-to-work laws.[4]

In 2016, WILL announced the launch of the Center for Competitive Federalism, a national effort to bring lawsuits and conduct research to promote state sovereignty.[5] That same year, the organization filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Wisconsin's Unfair Sales Act, also known as the minimum markup law, which prevents companies from selling products below cost.[6][7] In 2017, it filed a lawsuit in the Wisconsin Supreme Court Koschkee v. Taylor arguing that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) issued regulations without the approval of the state's governor and the Wisconsin Department of Administration, thus violating the REINS Act. It was seen as an attempt to limit the power of Governor Tony Evers, then the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Though Evers's role was nonpartisan, he had announced he would challenge Republican Scott Walker for the governorship.[8] In June 2019, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-2 in favor of WILL, determining that DPI could not make administrative rules without approval of the governor.[9]

In 2019, WILL petitioned Paul V. Malloy, the presiding circuit court judge in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin,[10][11] to remove 234,000 voters from the statewide rolls. The judge ruled in favor of WILL, purging the voters.[12] The WDC filed suit in federal court to halt the contested purging.[13][14] Acting on behalf of the state's Elections Commission which experienced a 3-3 split on the matter, Josh Kaul, Wisconsin's Attorney General, joined the appeal to stay Malloy's removals.[15] The Elections Commission estimated that the voter verification process would take from one to two years to complete prior to initiating any action to remove those former voters, the accuracy of whose registrations still remained unresolved.[16] Despite the lack of sufficient evidence for removal of that extraordinary number of qualified voters, the state could be forced to comply with Malloy's order.[17] On January 2, 2020, WILL said it asked the circuit court to hold the Elections Commission in contempt, fining it up to $12,000 daily, until it advanced Malloy's December 17, 2019 order to remove from the rolls, registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters who might have moved to a different address. The case was being heard in a state appeals court, but it was presumed that the conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court could be expected to support Malloy's ruling.[18] The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard the case about the purging of the voter rolls on October 4, 2020, but was not expected to make a decision before the November election.[19]  

The purge was construed to be targeting voters living in the cities of Madison, and Milwaukee, and other University of Wisconsin System and private college towns, which all tended to favor Democrats.[13][14] Of the three named plaintiffs in the case, two were significant contributors to state Republican Party candidates' campaigns, including David W. Opitz who had represented the county in the legislature.[13][14] Reporter and author Greg Palast associated the Wisconsin effort at voter purging as conforming to a national Republican Party strategy which had attracted international attention.[20] On January 12, 2020, Malloy found the three Democrats on the stalemated six-member Elections Commission to be in contempt of court, ordering them each to pay a fine of $250 daily until they complied with his order. Malloy demanded its urgent implementation of his order, saying, "We're deadlocked, time is running and time is clearly of the essence."[21] The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examined the list of voters subject to being purged because they were presumed to have moved and found that about 55 percent of those registrants had been domiciled in municipalities that had been won by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. Those were mainly from Wisconsin's largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, as well as other college towns.[22] In 2016, Trump had carried Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes. After the contempt order was issued by Malloy, a stay issued later that day by the state Supreme Court upheld his purge mandate.[22] That finding was subsequently reversed by an appeals court, but WILL appealed its decision to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.[23] In the April 7, 2020 election, voters, by an unusually large margin of 120,000 votes, ousted incumbent Daniel Kelly, a conservative Supreme Court justice, who had been appointed by Governor Scott Walker. Kelly had been thought to be a possible swing vote in the Court's deciding the case.[24]

In September 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, WILL filed lawsuits to stop a face mask mandate in Wisconsin.[25] Governor Evers has issued orders extending those mandates from November 18, 2020, through mid-January, 2021.[26]

• Official website
• Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on Ballotpedia