Chris “Law Dork” Geidner
@chrisgeidner

BREAKING: SCOTUS allows Texas’s SB 4 to go into effect, allowing state criminal enforcement of a state immigration law. More to come at Law Dork. https://www.lawdork.com

The majority gives no reasoning; Barrett, joined by Kavanaugh, gives an embarrassingly absurd *this is just an administrative stay* concurrence; Sotomayor, joined by Jackson, is extremely unhappy in their dissent (below); and Kagan respectfully dissents as well.

Here's the opinion (I was running home from the gym):

23A814 and 23A815 March 19

Tuesday's Democratic primary for one of three contested seats on the Ohio Supreme Court will kick off a high-stakes battle for partisan control of the court this fall.

The court, which currently has a 4-3 Republican majority, holds sway over how to implement an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights that voters overwhelmingly approved last year.

Ohio is one of 33 states with supreme court races this year and among the few where voters have an opportunity to flip partisan control of the court.

To do so, Democrats must sweep all three races in November, retaining two incumbents — Justices Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart — and winning an open seat. That will be a difficult task, given that the state Supreme Court has been under Republican control since 1986 and the former swing state's overall politics have tacked right in recent years.

But Democrats see an opening after 57% of Ohio voters backed a reproductive rights measure last fall. They plan to draw attention to the court's influence over the amendment's future and see the races as a possible way to chip away at the Republican Party’s longstanding control of all three branches of government in Ohio.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Court orders that prohibited two criminal defendants from possessing firearms while they awaited trial were constitutional because they were in line with past restrictions on firearms, a federal court ruled Monday.

Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, found that U.S. laws have historically sought to disarm dangerous criminal defendants, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Sanchez said those previous prohibitions justified the restrictions placed on John Thomas Fencl and Jesus Perez-Garcia, defendants in California whose challenges to the law were consolidated in Monday’s order.

“Here, the historical evidence, when considered as a whole, shows a long and broad history of legislatures exercising authority to disarm people whose possession of firearms would pose an unusual danger, beyond the ordinary citizen, to themselves or others,” Sanchez wrote. “The temporary disarmament of Fencl and Perez-Garcia as a means reasonably necessary to protect public safety falls within that historical tradition.”

Katie Hurrelbrink, an attorney for both men, told the Times she intended to “continue litigating this” by asking for a review by a larger, en banc appellate panel and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Conservative activist and Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo recently outlined his pitch for billionaires on how they can help move the United States government and society to the right.

“It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress,” Leo said in a new podcast interview, calling on the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts.

“We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society,” Leo said of the Supreme Court. “And I think we should take full advantage of it.”

The co-chair of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network, Leo is best known as the man who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative 6-3 supermajority, in his role as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser. Leo’s dark money network, which received a historic $1.6 billion infusion in 2021, additionally helps bring cases before the high court, influence which cases the justices consider, and shape the court’s decisions. As Rolling Stone reported last month, Leo has been working to expand his network in recent months.

Leo has been at the center of the ethics questions swirling around the Supreme Court in the past year. ProPublica reported that Leo arranged Justice Samuel Alito’s seat on a private jet — paid for by a billionaire hedge-fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008. He also reportedly steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife.

Ohioans now have the constitutional right to abortion ? a monumental shift in how the state has handled reproductive rights.

But for the average patient entering an Ohio abortion clinic, nothing has changed.

Ohio abortion providers aren't performing abortions after 22 weeks. Patients must wait 24 hours after their first visit to obtain the necessary pills or have a procedure. A dispute over using telemedicine is playing out in court.

"We did not get to the severe abortion restrictions that we have in Ohio overnight," said Dr. Adarsh Krishen, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio. "We're not going to get out of that situation ? even with the passage of Issue 1 ? overnight. It's going to take time and energy to be able to lift those restrictions."

Most of that time and energy is spent in court.

Attorneys representing Ohio's abortion clinics have sued to permanently block a ban on most abortions. The law, which has been on hold since September 2022, prohibits doctors from performing abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is about six weeks into pregnancy.

March 13 (Reuters) - Two conservative federal appeals court judges on Wednesday criticized judicial policymakers for adopting a new rule aimed at curtailing "judge shopping" by state attorneys general, activists and others who challenge government policies in courthouses where one or two sympathetic judges hear most cases.

U.S. Circuit Judges James Ho and Edith Jones of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in separate statements said the policy approved by the U.S. Judicial Conference on Tuesday was the result of political pressure and conflicted with federal law.

The rule the 26-member Judicial Conference approved was designed to curb a litigation strategy used by conservative litigants to challenge Biden administration policies, often in one-or-two judge courthouses in Texas.

"Judges are supposed to follow the laws enacted by Congress, not bend the rules in response to political pressure," Ho said in a statement.

A spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts had no comment.

Many of the lawsuits at issue were filed in small federal courthouses in Texas, whose one or two judges, appointees of Republican presidents, have regularly delivered wins for Republican state attorneys general, activists and companies seeking to block policies concerning abortion, immigration, gun control, labor law and other hot-button issues.

LANSING — Michigan Supreme Court Justice David Viviano will not seek reelection this fall.

Viviano announced his decision in a late Friday statement, calling his tenure on the state’s highest court “the honor of my lifetime.”

He thanked those who supported and encouraged him throughout the years, and he said he will announce future plans closer to when his term expires Dec. 31.

“Although I have respectfully disagreed with many of the court’s decisions in recent years, it has been a privilege to participate in the discussion of legal issues of major significance to our state,” Viviano said. “I remain committed to the rule of law, and am optimistic about the future.”

Viviano is one of three Republican-nominated justices, alongside Chief Justice Elizabeth Clement and Justice Brian Zahra, on the Democrat-controlled court. His pending departure means Republicans will not have a supreme court incumbent advantage in the November general election.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (mostly) affirmed yet another ruling against the Biden administration issued by Federal District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk--who is probably best known for his decision invalidating the long-ago FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. In Tuesday's ruling in Deanda v. Becerra, a panel of the Fifth Circuit upheld a decision by Judge Kacsmaryk obligating federally-funded Title X clinics to comply with a Texas law that gives parents veto power over their minor children's access to contraception, notwithstanding the federal government's argument that Title X pre-empts the state law.

In today's essay I don't directly address the Fifth Circuit's substantive conclusion. Rather, I'll delve into a number of oddities and procedural puzzles that call into question both the court's decision to reach the merits and the implications of the ruling going forward.

The Texas law at issue isn't specific to contraception. It grants to parents of a minor child "the right to consent to the child's marriage, enlistment in the armed forces of the United States, medical and dental care, and psychiatric, psychological, and surgical treatment." Contraception is medical care. Thus, the state law does appear to give the plaintiff Alexander Deanda a right to block his minor daughter's access to contraception. (According to the Fifth Circuit panel, Deanda originally sued in his capacity as father of three minor daughters, but only one remains a minor.)

As an initial matter, the Texas law could well be unconstitutional. In Carey v. Population Services, Inc. (1977), SCOTUS held that minors have a constitutional right to contraception. Meanwhile, in various post-Roe cases, the Court held that parents cannot be given blanket control over their minor children's access to abortion; a parental consent or even a parental notification law for minors seeking abortions was valid only with a judicial bypass. Presumably that would also be true of contraception, as some lower courts held. And because Dobbs purported to preserve the right to contraception, there remains a strong argument that state laws requiring parental consent for contraception are unconstitutional unless they provide for a judicial bypass. If that's so, then one never even gets to the pre-emption question because the Texas law, which does not include a judicial bypass, is simply invalid as applied to block minors' access to contraception.

But no one seems to have made that argument, so I'll set it aside for now.

The Supreme Court will allow a public Texas university’s unconstitutional ban on drag shows to remain in effect, in a decision announced Friday.

The Court’s decision in Spectrum WT v. Wendler is just one line long and offers no explanation. The decision is also only temporary, but it effectively means that LGBTQ college students in North Texas are not allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights for an indefinite period of time.

This is a story with two very clear villains. One is a university president who banned drag shows on campus, allegedly because he believes that drag is sexist. The other is a notoriously anti-LGBTQ judge.

Spectrum WT is an LGBTQ student organization at West Texas A&M University. It was supposed to hold its annual drag show last March at a campus venue that, according to the organization’s lawyers, hosts concerts, beauty pageants, political events, and other performances hosted by student groups.

Less than two weeks before the drag show was supposed to take place, the university’s president, Walter Wendler, abruptly canceled it and announced that he was banning drag performances from campus.

Wendler’s stated reason for the ban is, to say the least, unusual. He claimed that drag, a kind of theater that satirizes gender norms and often features men dressed in conventionally feminine clothing and makeup, is “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” He also likened it to blackface.