2019—In response to a decision by the Attorney General that aliens in removal proceedings awaiting action on their applications for asylum must generally be detained during the process, federal district judge Marsha Pechman (in Padilla v. ICE) enters a nationwide injunction requiring the United States to provide bond hearings for that class of aliens.
Dissenting from a Ninth Circuit panel decision affirming Pechman’s order in March 2020, Judge Bridget Bade will object that the Supreme Court “has repeatedly interpreted [a statutory provision] as a bar on classwide injunctive relief against” removal proceedings and that two other federal appellate courts have so ruled with respect to the very circumstances of this case.
In January 2021, the Supreme Court will vacate the Ninth Circuit’s judgment (and remand the case for further consideration in light of its ruling in another case).
2025—In the decades after Roe v. Wade (1973), the Wisconsin legislature enacted a series of laws on abortion that were designed to restrict abortion operate within the limited space that the Roe regime allowed. But it never repealed its longstanding ban on non-therapeutic abortions, which became enforceable again after the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
By a vote of 4 to 3, the Wisconsin supreme court rules (in Kaul v. Urmanski) that the post-Roe enactments somehow impliedly repealed the state’s ban on non-therapeutic abortions.
Justice Brian Hagedorn’s dissent soundly condemns the majority opinion as “pure policymaking, driven by antagonism toward a law the majority does not like.” In page after page, he eviscerates the majority’s gross misapplication of the “rarely used, highly disfavored doctrine of implied repeal.”
In her own dissent, Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler likewise condemns the majority opinion as a “jaw-dropping exercise of judicial will” that “fail[s] to hew to any semblance of traditional judicial decision-making.” She also explains that the “majority is compromised when it comes to the issue of abortion”: Specifically, when one member of the majority, Justice Janet Protasiewicz, campaigned for her seat in 2023, she “expressed her support for abortion rights repeatedly,” “called the law at the heart of this case ‘draconian’ and decried the idea that the law might stay in place.” Further, “the other justices in the majority also made statements indicating how they vote in this case or endorsed then-Judge Protasiewicz.”
In a third dissent, Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley blasts a concurring opinion by Chief Justice Jill Karofsky that “reads as a parody of progressive politics”: Karofsky “rewrites history, erases and insults women by referring to mothers as ‘pregnant people,’ slanders proponents of the pro-life perspective, and broadcasts dangerously false narratives about laws restricting abortion.”