From my review of what I acknowledge is merely a small sample of her opinions, I can’t say that I’m impressed by the quality of Judge Wood’s judicial craftsmanship. In addition to her extraordinary defiance of the Supreme Court’s mandate in National Organization for Women v. Scheidler and her successive 8-1 and 8-0 reversals (see Part 1) and her sloppy separation-of-powers analysis in French v. Duckworth (see Part 3), consider Wood’s dissenting opinion in Hinrichs v. Speaker of the House, 506 F.3d 584 (7th Cir. 2007).
Under review in Hinrichs was the permanent injunction, on Establishment Clause grounds, that a district judge (David F. Hamilton, President Obama’s nominee to the Seventh Circuit, as it happens) issued against the Indiana House of Representatives’ practice of legislative prayer. The panel majority ruled that plaintiffs did not have standing to maintain their lawsuit and, on that basis, reversed the district court’s judgment and remanded with instructions to dismiss the case for want of jurisdiction. Wood, in dissent, disagreed with the majority’s analysis of the standing issue.
I will not probe here the merits of the competing positions taken by the majority and Wood on the question of standing to raise the Establishment Clause challenge. Nor will I do more than note the incongruity of Wood’s celebrating the “relative harmony in which people of differing religious beliefs have joined together to form a common civil society,” when Wood herself has been vicious in misrepresenting religious beliefs that she is hostile to (see Part 2, which includes an update). I will instead highlight an elementary defect in what Wood calls her dissent.
Wood states early in her dissent that she “would find that the plaintiffs here have standing to sue and would proceed to the merits of the case.” But she somehow neglects to take that second step. Once she finds that plaintiffs have standing, Wood must proceed to the merits in order to determine whether she would affirm the district court’s injunction, reverse and vacate it, modify it, or take some other action. If she were to reverse the injunction on the merits, her opinion, rather than being a straight dissent, would be an opinion concurring in the judgment in part (in its reversal of the district court) and dissenting in part (from the remand instructions). In other words, Wood never completed her appellate review of the district court’s order, and she thus didn’t do the work necessary to render her opinion a dissent.
It may well be that sloppiness like Wood’s is more common than I realize. But an essential part of the judicial craft, properly exercised, is paying close attention to the particular case at hand. For an appellate judge, that involves, among other things, resolving the issues that are necessary to the disposition of the case.