Category: UW Experts in the News

A constitutional court is built to do something almost no one else in a democracy can do: tell the majority it has gone too far. But a court has no army, and no budget of its own. Whether its rulings mean anything depends on other people choosing to honor them, including the officials who must carry them out, and, as Barry Friedman has argued, the public that those officials ultimately answer to. That dependence is the soft spot at the heart of judicial power, and populists everywhere have figured out how to press on it.

Ion Meyn, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviewed videos shared on social media and Patterson’s remarks about the shooting at the request of the Cap Times. Meyn called the shooting unnecessary.

“What’s particularly egregious to me is that this person seems to have been going into compliance at the time he was shot in the head,” Meyn said.

John Gross, a clinical associate professor in UW-Madison’s Law School who researches police use of force, also reviewed the videos. He questioned whether there were opportunities for officers to de-escalate the situation before making physical contact with Ruiz.

Dan Vimont has a depressing prediction for anyone concerned about climate change.

“We will almost definitely shatter the global temperature record in 2027,” said Vimont, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Energy Department has underestimated the potential deadly consequences should plutonium escape the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which produces bomb cores for America’s nuclear weapons, a study published today by independent scientists found.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) wildlife ecologist quickly swung into action. He placed a small speaker on the hood of the truck and set it to play the same “Who cooks for you?” call on repeat, an irresistible provocation for the aggressively territorial owl species. Then, he pulled his 12-gauge Beretta shotgun from the truck’s cab and snapped a single birdshot-packed cartridge into place.

Doctors are warning people to pay close attention to hydration this 4th of July weekend as temperatures climb into the 80s.

Jeff Pothof, an emergency medicine physician at UW-Health, said mixing alcohol with heat is a dangerous cocktail.

But John Gross, a criminal defense attorney who teaches at the University of Wisconsin Law School, argues it’s misleading to compare Dugan’s circumstances to those other cases.

“Those included people who have lived in what we call Wisconsin for time immemorial,” University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor John Hall said, including the Ojibwe, Dakota, Menominee and Ho Chunk. It also included the Sauk and Meskwaki, who were not indigenous but had migrated over the preceding century.

Athletes like Henry Aaron, Bart Starr and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weren’t born here, but they helped deliver trophies to our state.

“The state of Wisconsin was a part of their journeys to the hall of fame,” said Ashley Brown, the Allan H. Selig Chair in the History of Sport and Society at UW-Madison.

“As your water balance gets off, your electrolytes get kind of a little sideways, you start having cramps,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, an emergency medicine doctor with UW Health. “If you’re sweating profusely and you’re feeling lightheaded when you stand up, and now you’ve got this cramp in your calf that just won’t go away, that’s your body telling you you are not doing OK. You’ve got to get out of this heat, get yourself hydrated before you get more ill.”

Children wearing sandals can suffer deep burns to their feet when they drop sparklers, according to a UW Health emergency medicine physician. Dr. Jeff Pothof said burns to fingers or the side of the head are also common injuries he sees.

With the Fourth of July holiday coming up this week, distinguished psychologist at UW Health Dr. Shilagh Mirgain chats about ways people can come together to celebrate patriotism.

“We had great abundant soils where we could grow barley and wheat, hops, and we had plenty of water that was readily available,” said Robin Shepard, a Madison-area beer writer and assistant dean of UW-Madison’s Department of Extension. “Those were the things that really came together to make it the perfect storm for brewing.”

“Per the executive order, no one would be losing their citizenship,” Erin Barbato, the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School, explained.

Still, Barbato said the order had the potential to cause “chaos.”

Six weeks out from the Democratic primary, which will decide which of six remaining candidates will be on the ballot in November, voters are largely tuned out, said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Torey Dolan, assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, joined WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” to talk about the history of the case and what the ruling could mean for tribal land buybacks around the state.

Last year, a solar project in Dane County opened with the idea of combining green energy and farming. Known as “agrivoltaics,” the co-location of solar energy and agriculture, the Kegonsa Research Campus is one of the largest in the country. We hear University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ankur Desai, who is a leader in the project.

Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, say with only a few exceptions, it seems as if this year’s run-up to summer, which arrived at 3:24 a.m. Sunday, June 21, was relatively mild. By that, they mean very few really oppressively hot and humid days.

Fast forward to today, and the end is nowhere in sight.

About four in 10 interns still don’t make money, according to some labor estimates.“It still feels kind of ludicrous in 2026 that we’re still having this conversation,” said Matthew Hora, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies the transition from higher education to the labor market.

Research varies about the scale of Wisconsin’s housing shortage, but according to the think tank Forward Analytics, the state needs somewhere between 84,000 and 140,000 new units of housing by 2030 to keep up with population demand.

“Which is a short time period,” said Kurt Paulsen, who teaches and researches affordable housing finance and policy at UW-Madison.