A federal appeals court has blocked the enforcement of a ruling by a New York federal court that had ordered sweeping reforms to the New York Police Department’s use of stop-question-and-frisk. The judge in that case, Shira Scheindlin, was well known as a fierce opponent of the tactic, and had ordered that there be a federal monitor be installed at the NYPD to oversee reforms in the use of the tactic (use of which has dropped significantly in recent years). The court also ordered Scheindlin off the case, explaining that she “ran afoul of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 2 (‘A Judge should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities’).”

The court also ruled that she violated Canon 3, which orders that a judge has to disqualify himself from a case where his “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” As evidence of Judge Scheindlin’s bias, the court cited ”the District Judge’s improper application of the Court’s ‘related case rule,’” when she suggested in a separate case that plaintiffs bring the case she ruled on against the NYPD, and interviews she gave surrounding the stop-and-frisk issue. One of those is CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s May 2013 profile of her for The New Yorker, which does indeed leave the reader wondering how she could be considered an arbiter of justice in the case. Also worth reading is the New York Times’ coverage of the trial, where the plaintiffs made a perhaps less compelling case than expected for the unreasonableness of their being stopped and frisked, and in which Judge Scheindlin made her suspicion of the New York City Police Department quite clear.

The case is premised not on the idea that stop-and-frisk, affirmed by a 1960s Supreme Court case as a legitimate policing tactic, violates the subjects civil rights per se, but that it’s applied in a racially discriminatory and overly aggressive manner. (In reality, relative to various groups’ crime rates in New York City, minorities are actually stopped less frequently than one would expect.)

The actual appeal will go forward in the spring of 2014. The ruling will make life more complicated for the next mayor of New York immediately, especially for Democrat Bill de Blasio, who has pilloried the current use of the tactic as racially discriminatory and unconstitutional — if the court eventually strikes down Scheindlin’s original ruling, de Blasio won’t be able to cite the legal precedent for whatever reforms he’d like to make of the NYPD (such as installing an inspector general).