Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
William Albert Bablitch
Wisconsin Supreme Court justice (1983–2003) and former state Senate majority leader; born in Stevens Point
$122,418
William Albert “Bill” Bablitch was the Stevens Point–raised lawyer who remade Wisconsin’s sexual-assault laws as Senate majority leader and then sat twenty years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Colleagues remembered the cook as much as the justice: after his mother died when he was thirteen, he fed six kids and a working father, and anyone who disliked the plate could eat cornflakes. He graduated from Pacelli High School in 1959, studied at the college in town, finished at Madison in 1963, and joined the Peace Corps in Liberia as an early volunteer teaching elementary school and coaching soccer. Law school followed during the Dow riots; he helped the injured and later appeared in the documentary The War at Home. Home meant Portage County district attorney from 1969 to 1972, then the state Senate, where he led the 1970s rewrite that stopped courts from dragging a victim’s whole sexual history through trial. He was also proud of the 1978 court reorganization that created the Court of Appeals. On the Supreme Court from 1983 to 2003 he once recused himself from a campaign-finance case because his own Senate memo was in the file, and he filed a complaint against himself over a closed meeting and paid a fifty-dollar forfeiture. In 1988 he landed a 38¾-pound musky in Vilas County—“the scales of justice,” the headline said. He died of cancer in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on February 16, 2011, Parkinson’s already in his hands. Memorials were held in Madison and Stevens Point. The city claim is childhood plus the district-attorney years.