Judge William Young has had a distinguished career since his appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, including serving as Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
At 85, his career includes notable cases such as the Boston Strangler and the Shoe Bomber. However, his 161-page opinion declaring the Trump Administration in violation of the First Amendment over visa denials is nothing short of bizarre.
It starts as a type of letter to an anonymous person who sent the judge a postcard.
Here is how the caption appeared in
Here is a closer image:
The opinion then ends with this conclusion:
With all due respect to Judge Young (who warrants considerable respect after his remarkable career), the captioning and conclusion are improvisational, impulsive, and injudicious. The court injected a political dialogic element in an opinion with sweeping implications for our constitutional system.
I have previously disagreed with some of these measures and agree with some points in this opinion. For those currently in this country, I have long supported free speech protections. That said, I expect that the Administration has the advantage on visa applicants outside of the country. The courts are already working to sort this out and it is likely to result in a split resolution. However, the tenor and odd elements of this opinion take away from these points.
It is an example of yielding to impulse, a problem that I have previously addressed with district court judges after the Trump inauguration.
The trend has even reached the Supreme Court on occasion.
Take District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who had previously presided over Trump’s election interference case. Chutkan was criticized for failing to recuse herself from that case after she made highly controversial statements about Trump from the bench. In a sentencing hearing of a Jan. 6 rioter in 2022, Chutkan said that the rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution.” She added then, “[i]t’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” That “one person” was still under investigation at the time and, when Trump was charged, Chutkan refused to let the case go.
Chutkan later decided to use the bench to amplify her own views of the pardons and Jan. 6. She proclaimed that the pardons could not change the “tragic truth” and “cannot whitewash the blood, feces and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”
Chutkan’s colleague Judge Beryl Howell, also an Obama appointee, lashed out at Trump’s actions, writing, “[T]his Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement.”
Other judges have engaged in extrajudicial commentary from the bench that undermines the integrity of the court system and their own authority.
The bizarre captioning and conclusion in this case is another such example. It only served to undermine the opinion itself and the legal points raised by the court. It may have been cathartic, but it was also tedious and prejudicial. It has a certain chest-pounding element that is neither necessary nor compelling for a court to insert into an opinion.
Judge Young would be wise to issue a corrected opinion without the novel captioning and conclusion . . . and simply send a postcard to this curious penpal.
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