2014—When Oregon officials irresponsibly refuse to defend their own marriage laws, the greatest relief that ought to be awarded is a default judgment in favor of the named plaintiffs. But federal district judge Michael J. McShane instead issues a lengthy opinion, replete with extravagant prose (“Let us look less to the sky to see what might fall; rather, let us look to each other … and rise” (ellipsis in original)), in which he rules that Oregon’s laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman flunk rational-basis review. Further, he orders Oregon officials not to enforce those laws against anyone seeking to marry a person of the same sex.

2020—In what the Fifth Circuit will call “an order that will be remembered more for audacity than legal reasoning,” federal district judge Fred Biery (in Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott) orders the state of Texas to allow every voter to vote by absentee ballot in the state’s runoff elections in July. Two weeks later, the Fifth Circuit will stay Biery’s injunction pending appeal, and in September it will vacate the injunction.