A federal appeals court judge appointed by President Donald Trump drew an “unprecedented rebuke” from dozens of his judicial colleagues after issuing what legal analysts described as a coarse and indecent dissent targeting transgender women.
According to Slate, Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals authored a solo opinion going after fellow judges for upholding Washington state’s anti-discrimination law in a case involving Olympus spa, a Korean spa whose owners argued they had a religious right to exclude trans patrons.
“VanDyke—a Donald Trump appointee to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—attempted to shame his fellow judges with lewd descriptions of genitalia and ultrapartisan complaints about trans antidiscrimination laws, which he derided as ‘Frankenstein social experiments,’” according to a preview of a bonus episode on Slate’s podcast Amicus.
Co-host Dahlia Lithwick said the conservative federal judge has built a reputation “as the judiciary’s most decorum-shredding troll,” but told listeners that he “outdid himself with this dissent.” Mark Joseph Stern, who hosts the podcast with Lithwick, said he hesitated to quote the opinion because he did not want to give VanDyke “the attention he so obviously craves,” but noted it contained language he said “has no place in a judicial opinion.”
“Although VanDyke regularly belittles his own federal appeals court with juvenile insults, this latest shock-jock routine crossed the line from attention-grabbing performance art into outright vulgarity, prompting an unprecedented rebuke from 29 of his own colleagues across the entire ideological spectrum,” according to Slate.
Lithwick and Stern argued the episode amounted to a “grotesque Supreme Court audition.”
“His trolling, however, may well draw the attention of President Trump, who was clearly the intended audience,” they concluded. But, according to Stern, such theatrics “will eventually undermine the entire project of judicial independence.”