In November, Seventh Circuit judge Richard A. Posner issued an opinion resolving a dispute between Northwestern University, on the one hand, and the campus Chabad house and its rabbi, on the other. Posner made a splash of sorts by conspicuously relying in his opinion on materials not in the record—namely, his own Wikipedia searches and a YouTube video of the rabbi.
The Chabad parties have now filed a petition (available here) for rehearing and rehearing en banc. Among its several grounds, the petition argues that the opinion was improperly based on supposed facts not in the record and that it “contains an abundance of factual assertions that are wholly unsupported by any evidence whatever, and many [of which] are false.” None of this will come as any surprise to anyone familiar with Posner’s cavalier sloppiness.
The petition also raises doubts about whether the case was randomly assigned to the panel that decided it. (In this regard, I’ll note my recent op-ed presenting concerns about non-random case assignments in the Ninth Circuit.)