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Notes -
In an update on the case of the 5 year old kid in a blue hat taken away by ICE, Judge orders release of 5-year-old detained by immigration authorities in Minnesota.
I was curious what the judge actually wrote, so I delved into the actual court opinion which I found here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492.9.0_3.pdf . And it seems this judge clowned himself with the most insane deranged court opinion I've ever seen. I've seen some performative court opinions, but I think this one takes the cake with gems like:
Interestingly, the court opinion makes exactly 0 legal arguments to support its decision.
I'm increasingly disappointed that activist judges aren't even pretending to be arbiters of the law, but are just doing whatever they want. Of course you expect an enemy judge to make his decision and figure out the justification later, but you expect them to at least think backwards and figure out some kind of fig leaf of legalese to claim that he actually believe that is the law. Instead this judge makes a mockery of the process. And of course for whatever reason, federal judges have never been punished for not doing their jobs.
At least the kayfabe of pretending we live in a country with laws I think is critical for legitimacy. At least for now the court of appeals can write a quick "your a retard" order on Monday, but even so it's a bad look.
For a neutral-ish perspective on the court opinion, try giving an AI the court opinion and asking what it thinks.
PS: AI told me that that the same judge is a known joker and is known for writing this punny though legally sound opinion here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8725121.pdf
Orders from trial courts only rarely contain opinions. The judge decided to write a brief opinion critical of the administration from putting him in a position where he had to issue the order. Why? Because he can. Judges make performative comments like this all the time, it just usually happens during motion arguments when nobody is there but the court staff and the attorneys.
This isn't true at all
I agree. In federal court in the US, when the judge writes an opinion, there is normally an explanation of the decision. Sometimes the judge will make a decision orally on the record and explain his reasoning in that decision. It's very unusual for the court to make a decision without any explanation. Sometimes it happens with evidentiary objections at trial, but if there are written motions it's very rare.
In this case, there was kind of an explanation, but it doesn't really conform to what federal courts normally do. It's virtually certain that there are precedent cases on the issue of whether an arrested pursuant to an administrative warrant is legitimate. So that ordinarily, a federal judge would cite to a couple of those precedents and explain why, in his view, the precedents do or don't apply.
Edit: The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that rov_scam is recounting his experiences in state court in his state
That's definitely part of it; even for the specific question of bench trials brought all the way to final judgment, there's a lot of state courts (and even some state appeals courts!) that just don't do opinions for all but the most noteworthy matters.
I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'. For laypeople, we tend to think of judicial orders as serious decisions: even if we recognize the difference between a final appealable order and something like a motion to stay, the latter's about as far down the line as we really put in the same bin.
But there's a lot of other things that are 'orders' in the sense that the court will fuck you over if you don't obey it, but not 'orders' in the sense of any serious legal decision. At the lowest level, there's a lot of stuff that's just 'we're going to next meet at X date' or 'parties should send me Y paper of Z pages on A, B, and C' subjects, withdrawal or substitution or an attorney, extension of time, yada yada. These are orders, technically, but they're just standard process stuff rather than serious evaluation of legal policy. In the middle, there's things like orders on motions pro hac vice, or discovery orders, or even demands to prepare around certain topics. These are 'decisions', but they're decisions that have a fairly standard answer, or where the logic underlying them is self-explanatory in the order.
At the higher end, there's stuff that could plausibly be serious and sometimes even final orders if granted, but basically never are and don't really need serious introspection to get there: this entry is an order on motion for judgment on the pleadings, and that'd be worth a long digression if it were actually granting judgement, but it's not, and it's very rare for that sort of order to exist. Recognizing a jury verdict is technically an order, and there's some ability for judges to issue things like judgment notwithstanding verdict, but it's not something you have to explain most of the time. Sometimes this stuff gets an opinion, and sometimes it doesn't, even when it's a final order.
By contrast, it'd be a little weird to see a final judgement for a federal case (where not settled, defaulted, consent judgements, yada), without an accompanying opinion explaining the law in detail. It probably happens, though the examples I can find tend to be civil forfeiture cases that are closer to default than I'd consider.
The messy bit is where, exactly, this order falls. Grants of writ of habeas corpus are kinda appealable orders, depending on situation, but they're not exactly the 'everybody's presented their full argument and had their day in court', either. I'd expect to see at least some attempt at a serious explanation for a high-profile case, but I can't swear every single one has been treated seriously by the courts, either.
((On the gripping hand, neither Grok nor Claude could find an example of a federal grant of the writ of habeas corpus without an accompanying opinion. Which doesn't mean much!)
To a large extent, I agree. But I think that for the most part rov_scam is the source of the confusion. Because any way you slice it, for this type of decision, a federal court would normally explain its reasoning -- either in a written opinion or by reading something orally into the record. The fact that you don't get an explanation for other types of motions and/or in some other courts is irrelevant.
And as I noted elsewhere, in this case the court did actually explain its decision. It's just that the decision appears to be bizarrely deficient in its analysis. Because this can't be the first time a court was confronted with the issue of the validity of an administrative warrant. The court should have cited the applicable precedent authority on this issue and then applied it; or explained why it applies; or explained why it doesn't apply; or whatever. Even if there is no precedent on this issue, stating that the United States has violated the separation of powers is not something you do lightly. You cite authority on that issue (which surely exists) and explain why it applies or doesn't apply.
The bottom line is that this is an objectively bizarre opinion and the Occam's razor explanation is that it was somehow informed by TDS.
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