The Volokh Conspiracy
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SG to SCOTUS: "District-Court Defiance of this Court's Decision in California has Grown to Epidemic Proportions"
"For good reason, the Constitution vests the 'judicial Power' in 'one supreme Court,' to which all others are 'inferior Courts.'"
On a regular basis, district court judges accuse the Trump Administration of flouting the law, and ignoring their orders. The Washington Post counted them up! Yet, at the same time, district court judges are flouting Supreme Court precedent.
Just yesterday, in Boyle (not Moyle), the Supreme Court reversed a district court for not following Wilcox, which "squarely controlled."
Now, the Solicitor General has filed yet another emergency application. Here, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the government to pay out certain DEI grants. Under the Supreme Court's decision in Department of Education v. California, these disputes belong in the Court of Federal Claims. But lower federal courts disagreed.
The Solicitor General used especially sharp language to describe this lower-court resistance--no, not resistance of President Trump, but resistance of the Supreme Court itself.
This application presents a particularly clear case for this Court to intervene and stop errant district courts from continuing to disregard this Court's rulings. . . . Notwithstanding this Court's decision in California, the District of Massachusetts declined to stay a materially identical order. . . . When the government pointed out that respondents' challenges to those grant terminations belong in the Court of Federal Claims under California, the district court recognized with serious understatement that California was a "somewhat similar case." App., infra, 221a. Yet the district court dismissed this Court's ruling as "not final" and "without full precedential force," "agree[d] with the Supreme Court dissenters," and "consider[ed] itself bound" by the First Circuit ruling that California repudiated.
As I noted earlier, Boyle makes clear that shadow docket rulings are precedential, though I think that point was established during the COVID free exercise cases. Hell, Chief Justice Roberts's concurrence in South Bay was treated as a super precedent! In July 2022, I wrote about the precedential value of emergency docket rulings.
The Solicitor General writes that this resistance has grown to "epidemic proportions":
Worse, this case is no outlier. District-court defiance of this Court's decision in California has grown to epidemic proportions, as courts have issued nearly two dozen decisions asserting jurisdiction over claims challenging grant or funding terminations since California.
The SG, echoing Justice Kavanaugh's CASA concurrence, explains that the Supreme Court is supreme and the Inferior Courts are inferior.
For good reason, the Constitution vests the "judicial Power" in "one supreme Court," to which all others are "inferior Courts." U.S. Const. Art. III, § 1. As this Court explained yesterday, when lower courts face materially identical stay requests, this Court's emergency orders "squarely control[]." Boyle, slip op. 1. Our judicial system rests on vertical stare decisis, not a lower-court free-for-all where individual district judges feel free to elevate their own policy judgments over those of the Executive Branch, and their own legal judgments over those of this Court.
This application will likely be granted. I think lower courts still will not get the memo. Let's see how long it take Circuit Justice Jackson to call for a response.
