Indicted Judge’s ICE Obstruction Case Gets High Court Critic (1)

A landmark prosecution seeking federal criminal obstruction charges against a Milwaukee County judge must go through the courtroom of a jurist who was disciplined for openly criticizing a rightward swing on the US Supreme Court.

Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan’s case was randomly assigned to 85-year-old Lynn Adelman, a US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin judge and former state senator nominated by Bill Clinton in 1997.

On Thursday, Dugan’s legal team—which includes former solicitor general Paul Clement—will appear in court less than two miles from where federal authorities arrested Dugan for allegedly attempting to usher a migrant out a private hallway from her own county courtroom to evade deportation.

Adelman, who ran three unsuccessful congressional campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, has received criticism from the right for his opinions and publications after nearly 30 years on the bench.

“Judge Adelman’s career of activist rulings puts him at the top of the list of Judges to watch for IRG’s Court Watch initiative and this case could help him achieve his goal as being known as one of the federal judiciary’s most activist judges,” Jake Curtis, director of the conservative Institute for Reforming Government’s Center for Investigative Oversight, said in an statement.

In 2020 Adelman penned an article entitled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy” for Harvard Law & Policy Review, in which he said that Chief Justice John Roberts’ confirmation testimony about being impartial was “a masterpiece of disingenuousness” and that “the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy.”

Adelman was publicly admonished for that article, and apologized “for any language that I used that could be construed as questioning the integrity of the Chief Justice or any other member of the Court or as expressing a bias against the Republican Party.”

He has had dust-ups over high-profile political cases. He was reversed and rebuked by the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2014 for not following US Supreme Court precedent in a ruling in which Adelman decided Wisconsin’s Republican-backed voter ID law was unconstitutional, after the justices found an equivalent Indiana law passed constitutional muster.

The “district judge found as a fact that the majority of the Supreme Court was wrong about benefits” of voter ID, Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote for the Seventh Circuit panel. But “in our hierarchical judicial system a district court cannot declare a statute unconstitutional just because he thinks (with or without the support of a political scientist) that the dissent was right and the majority wrong.”

On Wednesday, Dugan’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss the indictment. They’re asking Adelman to recognize judicial immunity that would prevent federal prosecutors from enforcing obstruction laws against a state judge for actions done in her chambers.

The case is U.S. v. Dugan, E.D. Wis., No. 25-CR-089, judge assigned 5/13/25.