Will Baude

I promise it's not that hard.

But it's been a while since the justice took Winnell's civil procedure.

So they prefer to just have a rule that says no regardless of the answer.

Well, so what's better is there's a concurring opinion by Justice Thomas that just openly says we're making this up.

That just says, look, this case is about the kind of collision course between the habeas corpus statute and civil rights statute.

But it's our fault that they're on a collision course because we misinterpreted the habeas stash a long time ago and granted too much habeas.

And we misinterpreted the civil rights statute a long time ago and said there are too many civil rights.

And so we get to fix that.

Having made this problem of sort of interpreting the statutes too broadly, we get to fix the problem of having to decide how to unbroaden them.

Yeah, although in a way the doctrine already existed also for other kinds of suits.

There was an even earlier case called Prizer versus Rodriguez that was like, so I'm in prison.

I want to get out.

It's hard to get out of habeas corpus.

I've got an idea.

Why don't I get rid of injunction instead and just ask for an injunction saying let me out?

That's just like an order in the court.

And of course, the courts say, well, you can't do that.

You can't just call it something else and get around the rules.

So the intuition that sometimes you shouldn't be able to just do an end run around the limitations we have on getting second-guessing a criminal trial is old.

But it's true that then courts just casually repeat various phrases from these cases without limitations that they contain, and they become much broader rules than they were.