1975—President Gerald Ford nominates Seventh Circuit judge John Paul Stevens to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by retired Justice William O. Douglas.
Not long before his death at the end of 2006, Ford will rashly state that he is “prepared to allow history’s judgment” of his presidency to rest exclusively on his appointment of Stevens—and that he specifically agrees with Stevens’s extreme positions on the Establishment Clause. But Ford’s actions belie his words, for (as this essay of mine explains) his own funeral ceremony at National Cathedral that he so carefully planned could never have taken place as it did—and probably could not have occurred at all—if Stevens’s radical secularist misreading of the Establishment Clause were governing law.
2016—In what Fourth Amendment expert Orin Kerr will critique as yet another “very unpersuasive” opinion, magistrate judge James Orenstein rejects the government’s application for a search warrant on the spurious ground that the target of the search had consented to the search. Orenstein, Kerr observes, is “a leader in the Magistrate’s Revolt, a small group of federal magistrate judges who have often come up with unexpected theories to reject court-order applications in computer search and surveillance cases.”
2023—In defiance of Supreme Court precedent on the ministerial exception to employment-discrimination laws, federal district judge James L. Robart rules (in McMahon v. World Vision, Inc.) that a Christian organization, World Vision, unlawfully discriminated against a job applicant who attested that she would comply with World Vision’s standards of conduct and then, once she received an offer for the position of customer-service representative, revealed that she was in a same-sex relationship.
In August 2025, a liberal panel of the Ninth Circuit will reverse Robart. The panel explains that customer-service representatives “perform key religious functions central to World Vision’s mission”: they “are responsible for effectively communicating World Vision’s worldwide ministries and projects to donors and supporters,” and they “engage with donors in prayer and give them the opportunity to join World Vision’s religious mission through financial contributions.” “Because each of these ‘vital religious duties’ lies at the core of World Vision’s religious mission,” the ministerial exception applies and bars the plaintiff’s claims.