Politics
The display of contrition came after Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh issued a stern warning directing judges to heed their orders in August.
WASHINGTON — Nearly two weeks after two Supreme Court justices delivered a stinging rebuke warning lower-court judges not to “defy” their rulings, the judge at whom the directive was aimed issued an apology from the bench, pledging to adjust to meet the highest court’s demands.
The acknowledgment Tuesday by Judge William G. Young in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts highlighted the precarious position that lower courts have landed in this year as they struggle to make sense of a growing number of unsigned orders the Supreme Court has produced through the court’s emergency docket.
Young’s apology came at a hearing Tuesday to discuss how to move forward after the Supreme Court in August overruled his decision to block the Trump administration from slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health.
Writing as part of that emergency order, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh had suggested that Young subverted the court’s will by failing to apply an earlier emergency order focused on canceled Education Department grants to his NIH case.
Young said Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.
“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Young, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.
“I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer,” he added.
Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.
But it has done so relatively opaquely through more than a dozen emergency orders — unsigned opinions issued relatively quickly and without oral argument.
Emergency orders are intended to be temporary, outlining whether a policy can be implemented while its legality is still being litigated. In practicality, the court’s orders — often encompassing a few paragraphs and little legal reasoning — have allowed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people and the elimination of billions in government spending.
In the case about the NIH grants in particular, the Supreme Court issued an unusually tangled decision, allowing the Trump administration to steam ahead with the terminations while simultaneously signaling that the president’s policy of canceling grants might be unlawful.
Before the Supreme Court acted, Young had ruled in June that the grants could not be canceled, heaping scorn on the Trump administration’s decision to terminate those grants en masse based on what he described as discriminatory motives.
The grants supported a wide variety of research, including work on preventing suicide or chronic diseases, like Alzheimer’s and HIV. But in many cases, the grants appeared to have been canceled after the Trump administration, sifting through the government’s funding streams, identified them as funding research focused on race and gender identity, including disparate health outcomes in Black, LGBTQ+ and other minority populations.
At the time, Young denounced the move in harsh terms, calling the terminations “appalling” and declaring it his “duty” to call out the Trump administration on the apparently discriminatory calculus. He ordered that the funding be mostly reinstated.
But in the Supreme Court’s order, the two justices suggested that Young had ignored the way the court already addressed the question of terminated grants in the earlier case.
“Lower-court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote.
“When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts,” he added.
Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who has written about the case, said in an email that the Supreme Court had put the onus on judges to divine its intentions despite issuing exceptionally short and vague orders. He added that the justices themselves have been inconsistent about whether emergency orders should be considered binding on lower courts, with Justice Samuel Alito saying during a speech in 2021 that “a ruling on an emergency application is not a precedent.”
“The less the court writes, the harder it is to argue that it is ‘clear’ that a ruling in a prior case applies to a subsequent case with even slightly different facts,” Vladeck said.
Despite Tuesday’s display of contrition, Young, 84, who was confirmed as a federal judge before either of the justices who had scolded him started law school, said the justices’ rebuke was like nothing he had seen in nearly five decades as a judge.
“I have served in judicial office now for over 47 years,” he said. “Never before this admonition has any judge in any higher court ever thought to suggest that this court had defied the precedent of a higher court — that was never my intention.”
He went out of his way to stress that it was never clear to him that the court’s emergency ruling in the education case represented its thinking in other instances of federal grants the Trump administration has slashed since January.
“I simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,” he said. “I stand corrected.”
After delivering the apology, Young met with lawyers out of earshot of the public, and eventually ended the hearing without saying more. He scheduled a follow-up hearing Thursday to determine how the case should proceed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Sign up for the Today newsletter
Get everything you need to know to start your day, delivered right to your inbox every morning.
