On Tuesday, Eleventh Circuit judge William Pryor issued a unanimous opinion (in Carver Middle School Gay-Straight Alliance v. School Board of Lake County) holding that a district court had incorrectly dismissed a student group’s complaint that a school board had violated the federal Equal Access Act by barring it from being established as a school club.

In a Bloomberg essay titled “Judge on Trump’s Short List Dodges the Tough Question,” Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wastes his readers’ time on the supposed puzzle of why Judge Pryor didn’t reach the student group’s First Amendment claim. Feldman posits ad nauseam that Pryor “wanted to avoid addressing [that] still more controversial question,” that “he wanted the statute to apply because he wanted to avoid having to decide whether the First Amendment does,” that “he didn’t want to go down the road of saying that middle schoolers have free speech,” and that “he made the best of what could have been a tough legal situation.”

If only Feldman had read the first paragraph of Pryor’s opinion with a modicum of care, he would have spared us his entire frolic-and-detour. As Pryor makes clear in that opening paragraph, the plaintiffs “appeal[ed] only the dismissal of their complaint that the Board violated the [Equal Access] Act.” In other words, the simple reason that Pryor and his colleagues did not address the First Amendment claim is that plaintiffs did not pursue that claim on appeal. So much for Feldman’s baseless speculation about Pryor’s supposedly ruling on the statutory question in order to duck the First Amendment issue.

[Update (12/11): Feldman has now revised his column to correct his misreading of Pryor’s opinion.]

Feldman is also wrong to claim that Pryor’s ruling would justify the headline “Judge On Trump’s Supreme Court List Allows Gay-Straight Alliance in Middle Schools.” The ruling does not decide the merits but instead (again, as the first paragraph discloses) remands the case to the district court for further proceedings.

Feldman’s assertion that Pryor’s amicus brief, as Alabama’s attorney general, in Lawrence v. Texas “analogized gay sex to ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’” is also wrong, for the reasons I explain here.