One of America’s most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

"I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The now-famous quip from Robert Reich cuts to the bone of corporate personhood. Corporations are people with speech rights. They are heat-shields that absorb liability on behalf of their owners and managers.

But the membrane separating corporations from people is selectively permeable. A corporation is separate from its owners, who are not liable for its deeds – but it can also be "closely held," and so inseparable from those owners that their religious beliefs can excuse their companies from obeying laws they don't like:

https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2014/10/13/hobby-lobby-and-closely-held-corporations/

Corporations – not their owners – are liable for their misdeeds (that's the "limited liability" in "limited liablity corporation"). But owners of a murderous company can hold their victims' families hostage and secure bankruptcies for their companies that wipe out their owners' culpability – without any requirement for the owners to surrender their billions to the people they killed and maimed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Corporations are, in other words, a kind of Schroedinger's Cat for impunity: when it helps the ruling class, corporations are inseparable from their owners; when that would hinder the rich and powerful, corporations are wholly distinct entities. They exist in a state of convenient superposition that collapses only when a plutocrat opens the box and decides what is inside it. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Key to corporate impunity is the rigged bankruptcy system. "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," so every successful civilization has some system for discharging debt, or it risks collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

When you or I declare bankruptcy, we have to give up virtually everything and endure years (or a lifetime) of punitive retaliation based on our stained credit records, and even then, our student debts continue to haunt us, as do lawless scumbag debt-collectors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

When a giant corporation declares bankruptcy, by contrast, it emerges shorn of its union pension obligations and liabilities owed to workers and customers it abused or killed, and continues merrily on its way, re-offending at will. Big companies have mastered the Texas Two-Step, whereby a company creates a subsidiary that inherits all its liabilities, but not its assets. The liability-burdened company is declared bankrupt, and the company's sins are shriven at the bang of a judge's gavel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

Three US judges oversee the majority of large corporate bankruptcies, and they are so reliable in their deference to this scheme that an entire industry of high-priced lawyers exists solely to game the system to ensure that their clients end up before one of these judges. When the Sacklers were seeking to abscond with their billions in opioid blood-money and stiff their victims' families, they set their sights on Judge Robert Drain in the Southern District of New York:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

To get in front of Drain, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, NY, then waited 192 days to file bankruptcy papers there (it takes six months to establish jurisdiction). Their papers including invisible metadata that identified the case as destined for Judge Drain's court, in a bid to trick the court's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to assign the case to him.

The case was even pre-captioned "RDD" ("Robert D Drain"), to nudge clerks into getting their case into a friendly forum.

If the Sacklers hadn't opted for Judge Drain, they might have set their sights on the Houston courthouse presided over by Judge David Jones, the second of of the three most corporate-friendly large bankruptcy judges. Judge Jones is a Texas judge – as in "Texas Two-Step" – and he has a long history of allowing corporate murderers and thieves to escape with their fortunes intact and their victims penniless:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

But David Jones's reign of error is now in limbo. It turns out that he was secretly romantically involved with Elizabeth Freeman, a leading Texas corporate bankruptcy lawyer who argues Texas Two-Step cases in front of her boyfriend, Judge David Jones.

Judge Jones doesn't deny that he and Freeman are romantically involved, but said that he didn't think this fact warranted disclosure – let alone recusal – because they aren't married and "he didn't benefit economically from her legal work." He said that he'd only have to disclose if the two owned communal property, but the deed for their house lists them as co-owners:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24032507-general-warranty-deed

(Jones claims they don't live together – rather, he owns the house and pays the utility bills but lets Freeman live there.)

Even if they didn't own communal property, judges should not hear cases where one of the parties is represented by their long term romantic partner. I mean, that is a weird sentence to have to type, but I stand by it.

The case that led to the revelation and Jones's stepping away from his cases while the Fifth Circuit investigates is a ghastly – but typical – corporate murder trial. Corizon is a prison healthcare provider that killed prisoners with neglect, in the most cruel and awful ways imaginable. Their families sued, so Corizon budded off two new companies: YesCare got all the contracts and other assets, while Tehum Care Services got all the liabilities:

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/prominent-bankruptcy-judge-david-jones-033801325.html

Then, Tehum paid Freeman to tell her boyfriend, Judge Jones, to let it declare bankruptcy, leaving $173m for YesCare and allocating $37m for the victims suing Tehum. Corizon owes more than $1.2b, "including tens of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices and hundreds of malpractice suits filed by prisoners and their families who have alleged negligent care":

https://www.kccllc.net/tehum/document/2390086230522000000000041

Under the deal, if Corizon murdered your family member, you would get $5,000 in compensation. Corizon gets to continue operating, using that $173m to prolong its yearslong murder spree.

The revelation that Jones and Freeman are lovers has derailed this deal. Jones is under investigation and has recused himself from his cases. The US Trustee – who represents creditors in bankruptcy cases – has intervened to block the deal, calling Tehum "a barren estate, one that was stripped of all of its valuable assets as a result of the combination and divisional mergers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy filing."

This is the third high-profile sleazy corporate bankruptcy that had victory snatched from the jaws of defeat this year: there was Johnson and Johnson's attempt to escape from liability from tricking women into powder their vulvas with asbestos (no, really), the Sacklers' attempt to abscond with billions after kicking off the opioid epidemic that's killed 800,000+ Americans and counting, and now this one.

This one might be the most consequential, though – it has the potential to eliminate one third of the major crime-enabling bankruptcy judges serving today.

One down.

Two to go.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

The Supreme Court creates train wreck over Texas immigration law.

Over the last forty-eight hours, the Supreme Court has made a monumental mess of its review of a Texas law that seeks to assume control over the US border. If the consequences weren’t tragic, it would be comical.

The Texas law is plainly unconstitutional. It is not even a close question. But the Supreme Court created a situation in which enforcement of that law was stayed and then permitted to go back into effect multiple times in a forty-eighth hour period. It was like the Keystone Cops—all because the Supreme Court does not have the fortitude to control the rogue judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here's the bottom line: As of late Tuesday evening, the Texas law cannot be enforced pending further order of the Fifth Circuit. See NBC News, Appeals court blocks Texas immigration law shortly after Supreme Court action. As explained by NBC,

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in saying in a brief order that the measure, known as SB4, should be blocked. The same court is hearing arguments Wednesday morning on the issue.

The appeals court appeared to be taking the hint from the Supreme Court, which in rejecting an emergency application filed by the Biden administration put the onus on the appeals court to act quickly.

I review the complicated procedural background below with a warning that it may change in the next five minutes. For additional detail, I recommend Ian Millhiser’s explainer in Vox, The Supreme Court’s confusing new border decision, explained.

Let’s start here: The federal government has exclusive authority to control international borders. The Constitution says so, and courts have ruled so for more than 150 years.

There are good reasons for the federal government to control international borders. If individual states impose contradictory regulations on international borders that abut the states, the federal government could not promulgate a single, coherent foreign policy—which is plainly the job of the federal government.

Texas passed a law that granted itself the right to police the southern border and enforce immigration laws, including permitting the arrest and deportation of immigrants in the US who do not have the legal authority to remain in the country.

Mexico immediately notified Texas that it would not accept any immigrants deported by Texas. (Mexico does accept immigrants deported by the US per international agreements.)

A federal district judge in Texas enjoined the enforcement of state law, ruling that it usurped the federal government's constitutional role. Texas appealed.

When a matter is appealed, the court of appeals generally attempts to “maintain the status quo” as it existed between the parties prior to the contested action. Here, maintaining the status quo meant not enforcing the Texas law that allowed Texas to strip the federal government of its constitutional authority over the border.

However, the Fifth Circuit used a bad-faith procedural ploy to suspend the district court’s injunction, thereby allowing Texas law to go into effect. In doing so, the Fifth Circuit did not “maintain the status quo” but instead permitted a radical restructuring of state-federal relations in a way that violated the Constitution and century-and-a-half of judicial precedent.

In a world where the rule of law prevails, the Supreme Court should have slapped down the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith gambit. It did not. Instead, the Supreme Court allowed the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith ploy to remain in effect—but warned the Fifth Circuit that the Supreme Court might, in the future, force the Fifth Circuit to stop playing games with the Constitution.

The debacle is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit. The reason the Fifth Circuit acts like a lawless tribunal is because the Supreme Court has allowed the Fifth Circuit to engage in outrageous, extra-constitutional rulings without so much as a peep of protest from the reactionary majority on the Court.

John Roberts is “the Chief Justice of the United States.” He should start acting like it by reprimanding rogue judges in the Fifth Circuit by name—and referring them to the Judicial Conference for discipline. Until Roberts does that, the Fifth Circuit will do whatever it wants.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

Shame on the Appeals Court - 03/20/2024

Late yesterday, the 5th Circuit Federal Appeals Court blocked Texas with a temporary injunction from enforcing their SB4 law which would allow Texas to arrest and deport migrants who enter their state illegally. Earlier yesterday, the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) issued an emergency appeal to remove a previous stay that was blocking SB4, a huge win for Texas. I didn't know that a Supreme Court appeal could be blocked by a lower Federal Court of Appeals, and they did so in the same day, crazy. So, Texas went from celebrating a victory for border security, to going back to being angrily frustrated at not being able to stop the stampede of illegal crossings. The 5ht circuit is entertaining arguments today on whether to stay the injunction, pending the outcome of an appeal at the SCOTUS.

“A majority of the panel has concluded that the administrative stay entered by a motions panel on March 2, 2024, should be lifted,” the unsigned order by the court reads. Yesterday, on March 19th, circuit judge Andrew Oldman disagreed: “I would leave that stay in place pending tomorrow’s oral argument on the question.” That was just hours after the SCOTUS had rejected an emergency request from the Biden jackasses to look at the administrative stay directed by the 5th Circuit's prior panel. The DOJ's (Department of Justice) stance on the law is that it violates the Constitution's Supremacy Clause which declares that states do not have the right to enforce immigration laws.

As per usual with emergency appeals, the Supreme Court did not give a reason for issuing their order. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amey Coney Barrett issued aligning opinions. Barrett wrote on regarding actions of the high court: “never reviewed the decision of a court of appeals to enter—or not enter—an administrative stay.” She continued, that it is “unwise to invite emergency litigation in this Court about whether a court of appeals abused its discretion at this preliminary step.”

Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson had dissenting opinions. Sotomayor said the order “invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.” She went on to write that the law “upends the federal-state balance of power that has existed for over a century, in which the National Government has had exclusive authority over entry and removal of noncitizens.” - I say, bullstit! States have always had the legal right and shared responsibility for protecting their sovereignty. Yesterday, the Mexican government said that it will not accept any illegal migrants coming back to them no matter what. They said that anyone deported who is not a Mexican citizen does not have to be accepted by them.

All governor Abbott wants to do is to enforce the laws to keep his state safe and secure, and the Biden commies are doing everything they can to impede that. It's disgusting! Will this nightmare ever end? I sure hope so.

Supreme Court Declines to Resolve Circuit Split on Exercise of Personal Jurisdiction in FLSA Collective Actions

Supreme Court Declines to Resolve Circuit Split on Exercise of Personal Jurisdiction in FLSA Collective Actions

On June 6, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear petitions seeking review of whether federal courts may exercise personal jurisdiction over claims of nonresident plaintiffs who join Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective actions when their claims are not connected to the defendant’s activities in the forum state. The petitions sought review of rulings on the issue by…

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Another excellent critique by Ruth Marcus of the Supreme Court’s originalist madness when it comes to guns. She notes a recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision that overturned the Federal government’s charges of illegal gun ownership of Zackey Rahimi, a man who was involved in “five shootings” in Texas, and who had a restraining order issued after reportedly assaulting his ex-girlfriend. 

Judge Cory T. Wilson, of the Fifth Circuit Court wrote:

“Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”  [emphasis added]

 Here are some other excerpts from Marcus’ column:

This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.

The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.

Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional. [...] As to historical analogues, [Judge] Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”

But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”

As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.

All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.

And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?

[emphasis added]

A dystopian America will be the legacy of the far right justices now sitting in majority on the Supreme Court--as well as the legacy of Trump, McConnell and the GQP senators who appointed them.

When you vote for president, you are voting for the person who appoints federal judges – including those on the US Supreme Court. When you vote for US senator, you are voting for one of the people who confirms those judges.

Federal judges have lifetime appointments. So bad choices for president or senator live on long past the four-year or six-year terms of the elected officials who put those judges on the bench.

If you want to know what a fully Trumpified federal judiciary would be like, check out the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. It covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Fifth Circuit makes the current US Supreme Court look liberal and capable.

The latest atrocity from the Fifth Circuit involves a decision where a state law forbidding abortion takes precedence over the survival of woman seeking emergency treatment.

The case is Texas v. Becerra, and all three of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s judges who joined this opinion were appointed by Republicans. Two, including Kurt Engelhardt, the opinion’s author, were appointed by former President Donald Trump. The case involves the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal statute requiring hospitals that accept Medicare funds to provide “such treatment as may be required to stabilize the medical condition” of “any individual” who arrives at the hospital’s ER with an “emergency medical condition.” (In limited circumstances, the hospital may transfer the patient to a different facility that will provide this stabilizing treatment.) EMTALA contains no carve-out for abortion. It simply states that, whenever any patient arrives at a Medicare-funded hospital with a medical emergency, the hospital must offer that patient whatever treatment is necessary to “stabilize the medical condition” that caused the emergency. So, if a patient’s emergency condition can only be stabilized by an abortion, federal law requires nearly all hospitals to provide that treatment. (Hospitals can opt out of EMTALA by not taking Medicare funds but, because Medicare funds health care for elderly Americans, very few hospitals do opt out.) This federal law, moreover, also states that it overrides (or “preempts,” to use the appropriate legal term) state and local laws “to the extent that the [state law] directly conflicts with a requirement of this section.” So, in states with sweeping abortion bans that prohibit some or all medically necessary abortions, the state law must give way to EMTALA’s requirement that all patients must be offered whatever treatment is necessary to stabilize their condition. It is important to emphasize just how little EMTALA has to say about abortion. EMTALA does not protect healthy women who wish to terminate their pregnancies. Nor does it preempt any state regulations of abortion, except when a patient is experiencing a medical emergency and their doctors determine that an abortion is the appropriate treatment. But when an emergency room patient presents with a life-threatening illness or condition — or, in the words of the EMTALA statute, that patient has a condition that places their health “in serious jeopardy,” that threatens “serious impairment to bodily functions,” or “serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part” — then Medicare-funded hospitals must provide whatever treatment is necessary. The Texas case, in other words, asks whether a state government can force a woman to die, or suffer lasting injury to her uterus or other reproductive organs, because the state’s lawmakers are so opposed to abortion that they will not permit it, even when such an abortion is required by federal law. And yet, despite the fact that the EMTALA statute is unambiguous, and despite the fact that this case only involves patients whose life or health is threatened by a pregnancy, three Fifth Circuit judges told those patients that they have no right to potentially lifesaving medical care.

Of course the ruling by the Fifth Circuit lacks basic logic. If the mother dies, the fetus is likely lost as well anyway. d'oh!

All three judges on the panel are Republicans – two having been appointed by Trump. Don't expect judicial genius from these folks.

Engelhardt’s opinion is surprisingly brief for such a consequential decision, and for one that reads a straightforward federal law in such a counterintuitive way. The section of the opinion laying out Engelhardt’s unusual reading of this federal law is only about eight pages long — yet it contains at least three separate legal errors.

This case will probably end up before SCOTUS. The best we should expect is for the Supremos to toss out the decision because of the legal errors made by the Fifth Circuit.

But in the long run, to protect reproductive freedom it's necessary to keep Republicans out of the White House and out of the majority in the Senate for the foreseeable future.

Be A Voter - Vote Save America

one thing i know about even is that any kind of ‘ignore-this-thing’ defense just. doesn’t work on them. any kind of technological or psychic barrier meant to convince your brain there’s nothing there, it just fails. things like that tend to come with the assumption that they can make you fill in the missing pieces with whatever you expect to be there. sometimes, what Even expects isn’t quite Right, enough so that it puts them off, makes them aware of there being something else hiding there. but other times, they don’t see anything but what’s actually there.

BY JOE PATRICE

In United States v. Rahimi, the Fifth Circuit ruled that a guy who voluntarily agreed to a court order — entered to resolve a domestic violence claim — barring him from owning guns cannot be criminally convicted for violating a court order prohibiting him from owning guns because of the Second Amendment. In doing so, the court reasoned — as we’ve seen before — that since domestic violence existed in the 18th century and the Framers didn’t punish abusers for having guns then, it can never pass a law to do it now.

No, seriously, that’s the logic. See Rahimi at 11.

But there’s a lot being written about the majority opinion. Let’s focus on the concurrence because that’s where Judge James Ho shines. And by “shines,” we mean turns in shoddy research that would get a first-year associate fired.

As a recap, here are the facts of the case:

Between December 2020 and January 2021, Rahimi was involved in five shootings in and around Arlington, Texas. On December 1, after selling narcotics to an individual, he fired multiple shots into that individual’s residence. The following day, Rahimi was involved in a car accident. He exited his vehicle, shot at the other driver, and fled the scene. He returned to the scene in a different vehicle and shot at the other driver’s car. On December 22, Rahimi shot at a constable’s vehicle. On January 7, Rahimi fired multiple shots in the air after his friend’s credit card was declined at a Whataburger restaurant.

That’s not a fact-pattern, that’s 15 minutes in GTA Online.

The spree resulted in law enforcement searching his home and finding firearms. However, Rahimi had voluntarily agreed to a court order barring him from possessing firearms to settle a domestic violence claim lodged by his ex-girlfriend. Having been found with guns despite a court order (again, an order that he agreed to) prohibiting him from having guns, a grand jury indicted Rahimi under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8). He would then plead guilty because he was, you know, guilty. Then he realized that he lived within the Fifth Circuit and launched a broadside against the constitutionality of his conviction, which the court approved.

Now to the concurrence.

Judge James Ho, thirsty as a lost wanderer in the Mojave for any opportunity to ingratiate himself to any future Republican administration that might elevate him to the Supreme Court, writes separately:

The right to keep and bear arms has long been recognized as a fundamental civil right. See, e.g., Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763, 784 (1950) (describing the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments as the “civil-rights Amendments”); Konigsberg v. State Bar of Cal., 366 U.S. 36, 49–50 n.10 (1961).

It’s always difficult for conservative judges to find support for their “deeply historical” analysis of the Second Amendment since it doesn’t exist. Even the majority opinion explicitly notes that, “In Emerson, we held that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms—the first circuit expressly to do so.” Since Emerson was decided in 2001, this is just letting pride get in the way of Originalist gaslighting. Come on, Fifth Circuit! You can’t go around admitting that the individual right to gun possession is barely old enough to drink.

So kudos to Judge Ho for trying to build a historical case! Unfortunately, neither of these cited opinions have much to do with the Second Amendment.

And they both… prove the opposite of what he’s arguing.

Eisentrager is about federal jurisdiction over Nazi war criminals. The Second Amendment does come up, but in a very particular way. Eisentrager concludes that war criminals held in Germany, who have never been inside the US, do not have access to US constitutional rights. By way of analogy, Justice Jackson explains that extending rights in this way would justify giving guerrilla fighters unchecked access to guns.

If the Fifth Amendment confers it rights on all the world except Americans engaged in defending it, the same must be true of the companion civil rights Amendments, for none of them is limited by its express terms, territorially or as to persons. Such a construction would mean that, during military occupation, irreconcilable enemy elements, guerrilla fighters, and “were-wolves” could require the American Judiciary to assure them freedoms of speech, press, and assembly as in the First Amendment, right to bear arms as in the Second, security against “unreasonable” searches and seizures as in the Fourth, as well as rights to jury trial as in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.

The Court’s point here is to highlight the absurdity of extending these rights to foreign combatants to prevent the military from blanket disarming enemy troops. It’s a stretch to extend this to support the claim that the Court thought that the Second Amendment doesn’t countenance regulations that would bar criminals from having guns within the United States. Indeed, several of the Justices on this opinion were on the Miller opinion that directly laid out that this was not the meaning of the Second Amendment.

But as bad as that citation may be, Konigsberg is somehow worse.

Konigsberg is about swearing that you aren’t a communist to get admitted to the bar (maybe that’s what we need to deal with all these woke Biglaw lawyers!). But the funny part of this citation is that the specific footnote Ho points to… reaches the opposite conclusion. While the case is about the First Amendment, Justice Harlan ends this footnote with the sentence, “In this connection, also compare the equally unqualified command of the Second Amendment: ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'” This ignores the whole “well regulated” part, which is dictionary definition of a qualification, but set that aside.

Judge Ho appears to have seen “unqualified command of the Second Amendment” and called it a day. EXCEPT that’s the antithesis of the whole footnote.

The sentence attached to the footnote is: “At the outset, we reject the view that freedom of speech and association, as protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, are ‘absolutes,’ not only in the undoubted sense that, where the constitutional protection exists it must prevail, but also in the sense that the scope of that protection must be gathered solely from a literal reading of the First Amendment.” Footnote 10 in full:

That view, which, of course, cannot be reconciled with the law relating to libel, slander, misrepresentation, obscenity, perjury, false advertising, solicitation of crime, complicity by encouragement, conspiracy, and the like, is said to be compelled by the fact that the commands of the First Amendment are stated in unqualified terms: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. . . .” But as Mr. Justice Holmes once said:

“[T]he provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.”

Gompers v. United States, 233 U. S. 604, 233 U. S. 610. In this connection, also compare the equally unqualified command of the Second Amendment: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” And see United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174.

Justice Harlan contends here that just because the First Amendment reads as “unqualified,” it doesn’t mean that the law treats it as such. He then throws in the Second Amendment specifically for the purpose of underscoring this point. It’s included to convey: “See, this is written to be unqualified too and literally no one is stupid enough to think the Constitution intends to create an unfettered individual right to guns.”

How did something so sloppy end up in an appellate opinion? Obviously, there’s a dearth of historical precedent for the proposition that the Second Amendment affords an individual right to gun ownership, but armed with AI-facilitated caselaw search tools all he could come up with for pre-2001 support is an opinion from 1961 that concludes the opposite way?!?!

This guy needs to stop boycotting elite law school clerks, because he needs some serious research help.

in what world does a judge think they have authority of drugs the fda approves. hell country

looks like the mifepristone case is headed to the supreme court

WATCH: Ride onboard with Max Verstappen around a wet Montreal circuit on his way to a fifth pole position of the year

Max Verstappen continued to his dominant form in a soaked qualifying outing in Montreal, as the Red Bull driver sealed pole position for Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix in commanding fashion – with his nearest rival over a second off his leading pace. Having shown improved form in FP3, Verstappen continued to set the timesheets alight all through qualifying. The two-time world champion's impressive final lap of a 1m 25.858s was good enough to see him lead the surprise package of Nico Hulkenberg, in second, by 1.244s. READ MORE: Verstappen charges to pole for Canadian GP as Hulkenberg grabs surprise P2 in wet and wild qualifying session Click on the video player above to ride onboard with Verstappen on his way to pole position at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, as he looks to seal yet another win in Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix. via Formula 1 News https://www.formula1.com

For fuck’s sake. ‘If there was a problem back in 1823 but nobody passed a law to fix it then we can’t fix it now if guns.’ I’m sure people people can’t wait to be governed like it’s 1776 again.

America.. land of placing an old piece of paper above the safety of women

American law has not historically been good to women, and whatever progress there once was is now vulnerable to regression. This return is being midwifed into the world by the theory of constitutional interpretation known as originalism—the idea that a law’s constitutionality today is dependent on the Constitution’s purported “original public meaning” when the relevant constitutional text was enacted. Its adherents market originalism as fair and free from favor or prejudice—but its effects are not and will not be fair at all. By its very nature, originalism threatens women and other minority groups who were disempowered at the time of the Constitution’s adoption. We must instead develop a new constitutional interpretative method that protects all Americans as equal members of our democratic society.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrated as much when it relied on originalism in United States v. Rahimi, a case about a law restricting the gun 

Does anyone have access to the rest of the article?