Supreme Court Mentions of Our Coblogger Will Baude, and My Colleague Richard Re
Sometimes law professors do say something the Justices find useful.
[1.] Congratulations to our coblogger Will Baude on having his Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful? article cited by Justice Sotomayor in her Kisela v. Hughes dissent this past Monday. (The citation was alongside a citation to the late, great Judge Stephen Reinhardt; here, by the way, is a lovely obituary for Judge Reinhardt by Heather Mac Donald.)
[2.] Congratulations also to my UCLA colleague Richard Re, whose amicus brief was discussed by four Justices (Alito, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Sotomayor) at oral argument last week in Hughes v. United States. Hughes turns on how courts should deal with past Supreme Court decisions in which no position garnered majority support; Richard has a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article on the subject, and he wrote an amicus brief based on that article. As Ian Samuel and Dan Epps noted in their superb First Mondays podcast (all Supreme Court, all the time), this is a classic true friend-of-the-court brief—a lawyer-scholar genuinely trying to help a court reason effectively through an issue, rather than stepping in to support a particular party.
No Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria here—nicely done, Will and Richard!