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, in its reversal two weeks later, will say is “an order that will be remembered more for audacity than legal reasoning,” federal district judge Fred Biery (in Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott) orders Texas to allow all voters to apply to vote by mail in the July 2020 primary runoff elections. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Biery opines, Texas law allowing voting by mail by voters age 65 and older (as well as by those unable to vote in person because they are away from home or disabled) unconstitutionally burdens the rights of voters under the age of 65.