Jake Curtis isn’t waiting for Donald Trump’s inauguration to suggest at National Review Online that the new president nominate Diane Sykes for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Among the list of potential nominees is Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Sykes, well known to the Wisconsin legal community and currently ranked within the three likeliest Trump appointees on at least one betting site.

Judge Sykes has served on the Seventh Circuit since 2004, authoring a number of significant decisions, but her service stretches back before that, with four years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, time as a state trial judge in Milwaukee, and a clerkship for Eastern District of Wisconsin Judge Terence Evans..

Indeed, the most important decision of Judge Sykes’s career may have been a state-supreme-court case, 2004’s State ex rel. Kalal v. Dane County Circuit Court.

As one leading Wisconsin conservative attorney put it, Sykes’s decision “set a method by which the court would interpret statutes” that originalists can be proud of, focusing “first on the text of the statute, and circumscrib[ing] the use of legislative history and other secondary sources.”

Justice Sykes set out the following framework, an eloquent and straightforward outline of originalist judicial thinking:

Judicial deference to the policy choices enacted into law by the legislature requires that statutory interpretation focus primarily on the language of the statute. We assume that the legislature’s intent is expressed in the statutory language. Extrinsic evidence of legislative intent may become relevant to statutory interpretation in some circumstances, but is not the primary focus of inquiry. It is the enacted law, not the unenacted intent, that is binding on the public. Therefore, the purpose of statutory interpretation is to determine what the statute means so that it may be given its full, proper, and intended effect.

Justice Sykes’s framework has now become the benchmark of judicial statutory interpretation in Wisconsin.