Court Opinion

ID: 9850860
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:03:44.878033+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:44.798296
License: Public Domain

EICH, C.J.
(concurring). I write separately (and briefly) not to set forth or argue a position. The dissenting judge's lengthy opinion advocating his view of this case, and to an equal degree his disagreement with both the reasoning and the relevance of the United States Supreme Court's decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Social Servs., 489 U.S. 189 (1989), is argument enough for one day.
The majority opinion in this case and the Supreme Court's opinion in DeShaney adequately explain the reasons underlying the decisions reached in each instance. Those reasons need not be restated (or re*942evaluated) here. I note only that DeShaney is the opinion of a majority of the nation's highest court on an issue crucial to this case and that, as an intermediate state appellate court, we are bound by decisions of the United States Supreme Court on questions of federal constitutional law — even though we (and several law-review writers) may disagree. See State v. Mechtel, 176 Wis. 2d 87, 94-95, 499 N.W.2d 662, 666 (1993); State v. Webster, 114 Wis. 2d 418, 426 n.4, 338 N.W.2d 474, 478 (1983).
The dissent criticizes the majority’s reasoning, and its analysis of DeShaney and other cases, as "fallacious." Dissent at 961.1 note only that, while I do not agree with the dissenting judge's arguments, I do not consider those arguments "fallacious." They are extensively researched and eloquently stated; but they are also, as are most legal positions, ones with which reasonable persons may disagree. Indeed, as the dissenting judge acknowledges, both he and the lawyers who argued their positions to us "struggled . . . with the legal [and] procedural issues" in the case. Dissent at 953 n.7.
We all did. Resolution of complex legal and constitutional issues is often a "struggle." It is not a task admitting of black-and-white certainties but one in which differing and often competing legal positions and analyses must be considered, interpreted, evaluated and, where possible, harmonized. And where harmony eludes us — as it often does in such cases (witness the dissents in this case, in DeShaney and in most of the other cases discussed in today's opinions) — it is rare that one side will have a monopoly on either truth or justice, or, rarer still, on both.
I join the majority opinion in this case because I am persuaded by its interpretation of the applicable *943law and the manner in which it addresses the arguments advanced by the parties. That is not to say that reasonable people — including other judges — will not disagree. But I doubt that any of us, whether in the majority or the minority, has the unquestionably "right" answer to the complex and often unsettling questions raised on this appeal.