Please Make It Stop

Supreme Court's eagerness 'to denigrate same-sex marriage' meant it failed to check facts: legal expert https://t.co/ph9acGBwKn

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 3, 2023

Maybe it’s being on TeeVee that makes you stupid.

"But it would be a mistake to let that obscure the central fact that the entire case was based on entirely hypothetical 'worries' that the web designer claimed to have about how the state's officers might come after her under the state anti-discrimination laws if a same-sex couple were to ask her to design a wedding site for them and if she were to refuse," Tribe said. "In my view, the disgraceful fact, which in no way depends on the falsity of the allegations about the fellow who supposedly asked Lorie Smith to design a website for a same-sex wedding, is the very fact that the Supreme Court's majority was willing to render what amounted to an advisory opinion that it would never have done but for its eagerness to denigrate same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights generally and that, under Article III, it had no business doing."

Except it wasn’t built on that. Oh, it was according to “The New Republic,” but I’d like to think Tribe knows better than to rely on a magazine article for a legal opinion.

But maybe that’s what TeeVee lawyers do. In the Slate article:

I think this is a nonstarter," former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, told Salon. "The Court glossed over standing in this case because a plaintiff is permitted to make a facial challenge to a law on the ground that yet violates the First Amendment." 

"If the allegations about fabrication are true, then the lawyers may have an ethics problem to address with their state bar, but it will not affect the outcome of the case," McQuade added.

I don’t think the Court “glossed over standing” here, precisely because the plaintiff was permitted to challenge on First Amendment grounds without showing a concrete injury. And again, if the dissenting justices didn’t notice this problem, maybe that’s because it isn’t there?

Nah! How could all those judges and justices not know what a magazine writer did? Clearly the superior authority on the facts and law of this case is a non-lawyer reporter. Even Lawrence Tribe seems to think so.

Some day we’ll talk about the actual holding of the case, and its affect on public accommodation law. We just won’t do it with TeeVee lawyers.