Dana El-Kurd
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But repeatedly, Roberts and the other justices have taken the Fifth Circuit to task for going to extremes in its ruling.
As Texas Tribune writer Eleanor Klibunoff put it, quote, if the Fifth U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals was a boxer, you'd bet on the other guy.
Writing a Supreme Court's reaction to Fifth Circuit rulings in July 2024, Klimanov noted that only three of the tribunal's decisions had been upheld, while eight had been overturned, a one-loss record that ranked amongst the worst among circuit courts in the country.
In the Mefa-Pristone case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, hardly a Bolshevik, expressed dismay that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine had been granted standing.
Kavanaugh wrote this.
For a plaintiff to get in the federal courthouse door and obtain a judicial determination of what the governing law is, the plaintiff cannot be a mere bystander, but instead must have a personal stake in the dispute.
If the standard set by Judge Ho and his peers in New Orleans remained in place, Kavanaugh warned, quote, Governing, he suggested, would become impossible.
It wasn't just on the issue of legal standing that the Supreme Court found the Fifth Circuit Court's judgment lacking.
In the case of Rahimi v. The United States, the Fifth Circuit overturned a federal law that prohibited domestic abusers from buying firearms.
The highest court on June 21st, 2024, overturned that decision by an eight to one margin.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who generally supports a very broad view of gun rights, said that history, quote, confirms what common sense suggests.
When an individual poses a clear threat of physical violence to another, the threatening individual may be disarmed.
Roberts also suggested that the Fifth Circuit misunderstood the Supreme Court's view of the Second Amendment.
Professor Yu told us that as conservative as the Supreme Court majority might be, outside of Clarence Thomas, they have found the Fifth Circuit's rulings to be an embarrassment to conservative judicial philosophy.
On that, again, I think that was an 8-to-1 opinion, and Clarence Thomas was the only person who would agree with the Fifth Circuit.
So in general, I think the Supreme Court is definitely conservative, but the Supreme Court appreciates a certain type of conservativeness that they can chew on, and it's something that it can lace with some academic legitimacy and not just some sort of attention-seeking...
paragraphs that would make people feel some sort of feeling.