Somehow I missed UC Irvine law school’s inaugural “Judge Stephen Reinhardt and Ramona Ripston Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” that took place on Monday. UC Irvine’s announcement states that the lecture “pays tribute to these two legendary advocates of civil liberty and justice” (emphasis added). So much for even pretending that Reinhardt might have been an impartial judge rather than an “advocate.”

In addition to quoting the “advocates” phrase, the Ninth Circuit’s public information office observes that Reinhardt “has participated in many of the court’s most noteworthy cases, including authoring the 2012 opinion affirming a lower court finding that a California law banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.” Somehow it doesn’t see fit to note that suspect case-assignment practices, including in the anti-Prop 8 case it refers to, may have accounted for Reinhardt’s extraordinary record of “participat[ing] in many of the court’s most noteworthy cases.”

Ramona Ripston, as anyone who paid attention to the anti-Prop 8 shenanigans will recall, is of course both Reinhardt’s wife and the former executive director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. In that latter capacity, she took part in a confidential strategy meeting with counsel planning to file the federal lawsuit against Prop 8; she authorized her organization to file pre-trial and post-trial amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs’ attack on Prop 8; and she publicly “rejoice[d]” over the district-court ruling against Prop 8. But somehow Reinhardt failed to recuse himself from deciding the appeal of the very case in which Ripston had taken part.

All too fittingly, the inaugural Reinhardt-Ripston lecturer was former Israeli supreme court justice Aharon Barak. As Seventh Circuit judge Richard Posner has put it, Barak “created a degree of judicial power undreamt of by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices,” “bases his conception of judicial authority on abstract principles that in his hands are merely plays on words,” and makes “the judiciary … a law unto itself.” Posner also quotes Judge Robert Bork as writing that Barak “establishes a world record for judicial hubris.”