A quick follow-up to my post on Ninth Circuit judge, and supposed Supreme Court contender, Sidney Thomas:
On his Crime and Consequences blog, Kent Scheidegger notes that Judge Thomas is “the author of what is quite possibly the worst opinion ever to issue from the Ninth Circuit, and that is saying quite a lot”—the 2003 en banc ruling in Summerlin v. Stewart (which I’ve also discussed here).
As it happens, Thomas seems to have generated plenty of contenders for “worst opinion ever.” Another trustworthy source who practices in the Ninth Circuit has independently used that same label to describe to me the per curiam opinion that Thomas and two of his hard-Left colleagues, Harry Pregerson and Richard Paez, issued to postpone California’s 2003 recall election (in Southwest Voter Registration Education Project v. Shelley), only to have their ruling unanimously overturned days later by an 11-judge en banc panel.