1996—In the face of repeated statements by the Supreme Court that the performance of abortions may be restricted to licensed physicians, a Ninth Circuit panel of liberal appointees (Harry Pregerson, William Canby, Michael Hawkins) rules in Armstrong v. Mazurek that plaintiffs challenging a Montana law that imposes such a restriction allows only licensed physicians to perform abortions have a “fair chance of success” on their claim and that the district court wrongly denied them preliminary injunctive relief.
In June 1997, the Supreme Court will summarily reverse the Ninth Circuit (by a vote of 6 to 3).
2014—In Bible Believers v. Wayne County, a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit confers “a clear heckler’s veto,” as dissenting judge Eric L. Clay puts it—or is it a thug’s veto?—on an angry crowd at the 2012 Arab International Festival. The panel majority rules that the “threat of violence” at the festival on the streets of Dearborn, Michigan “had grown too great to permit [a group of Christian evangelists] to continue proselytizing.”
Three months later, the Sixth Circuit will grant en banc review of the ruling. In October 2015, the en banc Sixth Circuit, in a majority opinion by Judge Clay, will hold that county police violated the constitutional rights of the Christian evangelists when they barred them from continuing to proselytize.
2019—In a divided ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Adams, a Seventh Circuit panel, in a majority opinion written by Judge David F. Hamilton, deems unconstitutional a provision of Indiana law that requires that parents be given prior notice of their minor daughter’s planned abortion unless a judge determines that such notice is not in her best interests.
2020—Four decades after Monty Python’s Life of Brian lampoons the supposed injustice that men can’t gestate babies, federal district judge Michael L. Brown, protesting that reality, rewrites federal law governing conferral of citizenship at birth. Because “it is impossible for two men to be related biologically to the same child,” Brown posits (in Mize v. Pompeo) that the long-established reading of a federal statute to require a biological relationship between the child and the parents for one avenue to citizenship at birth “would raise serious constitutional questions” regarding gay couples and should therefore be jettisoned.