1991—The New York Times and the Washington Post report that in 1990 Charles E. Smith, a wealthy real-estate developer, made gifts to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. in the amount of $140,000. Of that total amount, $80,000 was given before Justice Brennan’s retirement in July 1990. According to Brennan, Smith was a “dear friend” and “made these gifts in recognition of my public service.”
The Times and the Post immediately launch investigations into such matters as whether Smith had ideological affinity for Brennan’s liberal judicial activism and was rewarding that activism and whether and when Smith had made any previous promises concerning the gifts. Just kidding: There is no sign that follow-up investigations of any sort ever took place.
2011— More than thirty years after the end of his presidential term, Jimmy Carter’s sorry legacy of appointments to the Ninth Circuit lives on. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, joined by two other Carter appointees, rules that DaimlerChrysler, a German corporation, is subject to personal jurisdiction in California in a case in which Argentinian residents allege that an Argentinian subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler collaborated with Argentinian security forces to commit atrocities in Argentina during Argentina’s 1976-1983 “Dirty War.”
In January 2014, the Supreme Court will unanimously reverse Reinhardt. In her opinion for the Court, Justice Ginsburg will provide a primer on personal jurisdiction and condemn Reinhardt’s “exorbitant” holding.
Reinhardt will remain in active status on the Ninth Circuit until his death in March 2018.
2017—The Americans with Disabilities Act expressly defines “disability” to exclude “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments.” In other words, the ADA does not confer any protections on a person who claims to have been discriminated against on the basis of such a gender identity disorder.
The crystalline clarity of this provision somehow doesn’t stop federal district judge Joseph H. Leeson, Jr. In Blatt v. Cabela’s Retail, Inc., Leeson denies an employer’s motion to dismiss the ADA claims of a former employee who alleged that he had “Gender Dysphoria, also known as Gender Identity Disorder” and had been discriminated against on the basis of that condition.
Among Leeson’s somersaults of reasoning: Leeson concludes that it is “fairly possible” to read the term gender identity disorders “narrowly to refer to only the condition of identifying with a different gender, not to encompass (and therefore exclude from ADA protection) a condition like Blatt’s gender dysphoria, which goes beyond merely identifying with a different gender and is characterized by clinically significant stress and other impairments that may be disabling.”
What?!? We’re supposed to believe that it is “fairly possible” to read gender identity disorders to mean only gender identity (“identifying with a different gender”) and not to extend to disorders?
Further, the ADA’s general definition of disability involves an “impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of [an] individual.” Gender identity without “clinically significant stress and other impairments that may be disabling” wouldn’t be a disability. So what conceivable sense would it make to carve gender identity—but not gender identity disorders— out of the general term disability?