1. Today’s 6-3 triumph for the rights of homosexual and transgender people in Bostock v. Clayton County is a victory for justice and for reading laws as they were written rather than as some assumed or intended them to operate. Please read the rest of this thread.
2. Justice Gorsuch conducted a master class in interpreting legal texts when he patiently explained why the unexpressed intentions of a law’s authors or the conversational conventions of its users cannot be permitted to trump its unambiguous meaning. Go to #3:
3. That Title VII is about discrimination against individuals, not groups, is a sufficient answer to the objection that the employers in this case didn’t treat women as a group any worse or better than they treated men as a group. Go to # 4:
4. What’s undeniable is that the employers treated some individuals worse than others because of “such individual’s sex” as defined by their biological characteristics. The dissents call the statute’s but-for causation test “legalistic, ... wooden or literal.” But (go to #5):
5. that can’t change the fact that this but-for test “is the law,” as the majority rightly says. The dissenters accuse the majority of “legislation.” They are wrong. And their claim that Congress couldn’t *possibly* have “meant to protect a disfavored group” (go to #6):
6. barely conceals what the majority rightly identifies as “a cynicism” that belies claims to neutrality in adjudication. The majority rightly held that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” (Go to #7):
7. The Alito dissent is surely right that the Court’s holding will “have far-reaching consequences” in well over 100 different areas. Some (including me) welcome those consequences. For those who don’t, the place to turn isn’t the courts but legislatures. (Go to #8):
8. What became of the conservatives’ refrain that liberals should stop trying to “legislate from the bench”? How does the shoe feel when it’s on the other foot? The Kavanaugh dissent unhelpfully says “We are judges, not Members of Congress.” Right! (Go to #9):
9. My response to Justice Kavanaugh is: So BE a judge — the way Justice Gorsuch, Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor were in this pair of cases. And confront their reasoning head-on — without leaning on empty slogans and cliches. (Go to #10)
10. Of course progressives don’t always welcome textual analyses and might worry that this Gorsuch majority will complicate their lives in other contexts. To be sure, this remains a very conservative Court. But I say: Be glad for just outcomes when they come your way.
