This Here Court is Clappin' Back, Y'all
The form without the substance.
I wrote a few months ago about the emergence of “feelz jurisprudence”: intellectually empty judicial opinions that read like bitchy middle school essays, “with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery.”
So spend a few minutes today with the opinions, released by the Supreme Court this morning, in Trump v. CASA, Inc. (You can click the link or open the PDF file below.)
In a dissent joined by no colleagues at all, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson laments the court’s descent into technical analysis of legalese:
Y’all are analyzing the law, a Supreme Court justice says to her colleagues, and that’s mind-numbing. Why you bein’ all technical and shit?
In a formal legal opinion, Jackson keeps using rhetorical gestures that come directly from the world of the TikTok video:
She does this a lot, but let’s not bother to eat the whole rotten egg. Wait for it, y’all! Ohhh, SNAP, y’all! Responding, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pretty openly writes that another justice of the Supreme Court is an idiot:
And this is where we are: A justice of the Supreme Court ain’t sure why everybody talkin’ all this legalese up in this bitch. That shit mind-numbin’, y’all!
I didn’t go to law school, so I leave this question for people who have: Are there other examples of a Supreme Court opinion responding to a colleague’s dissent with this level of open contempt?
Brown Jackson showed her incompetence when she couldn't define the term woman because she wasn't a biologist. Great, let's give her 1/9 power on interpreting one of the most important documents in history because she has a vulva and a lot of melanin. What a clown show.
The Jackson dissent reminds me of many of the arguments I heard presented by minority law students in law school. Frankly, it deteriorated my respect for them. They thought of law as a tool to get them the result they emotionally wanted. Anything else was "systemic racism," though that term wasn't widely used then.