2020—In a brazen exercise in bullying federal judges, all ten Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee sign their names to letters to Eleventh Circuit judges Robert Luck and Barbara Lagoa demanding that they explain to the senators how they can take part in the Eleventh Circuit’s pending en banc proceedings in Jones v. DeSantis. Nine of the ten Democrats are also lawyers, so, as Eleventh Circuit chief judge William Pryor will inform the parties in the case, their letters to Luck and Lagoa, at the very time that plaintiffs’ motion to disqualify them is pending before them, are ex parte communications—communications, that is, outside of the presence of opposing counsel and generally barred by rules of professional conduct.
2021—Gender confusion, indeed. In a topsy-turvy ruling (in B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education), federal district judge Joseph R. Goodwin issues a preliminary injunction that requires school officials to allow “B.P.J.,” an 11-year-old boy who identifies as female, to try out for the girls’ cross-country and track teams at his school. Specifically, Goodwin’s order bars school officials from applying to B.P.J. West Virginia’s recently enacted “Save Women’s Sports Bill,” which provides that girls’ sports teams “shall not be open to students of the male sex.”
In reality-denying newspeak, Goodwin asserts that “B.P.J. is an eleven-year-old girl” who was “assigned the sex of male at birth.” On B.P.J.’s claim that the West Virginia law violates the Equal Protection Clause, Goodwin evades the simple fact that the law categorizes on the basis of biological sex by maintaining that B.P.J. is “not most similarly situated with cisgender boys” but is instead “similarly situated to other [sic] girls.” Based on that sleight of hand, Goodwin asserts that “there is an inescapable conclusion that [the law] discriminates on the basis of transgender status.”
To Goodwin’s great credit, eighteen months later he will reverse course, rule that the West Virginia law is constitutionally permissible, and dissolve his preliminary injunction. But in April 2024 a divided panel of the Fourth Circuit will issue a bonkers ruling against the law.
2022—Federal district judge Richard D. Bennett rules (in Buettner-Hartsoe v. Baltimore Lutheran High School Ass’n) that a private high school’s tax-exempt status under federal law qualifies as federal financial assistance that subjects the school to the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. In March 2024, a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel will reverse Bennett’s ruling.