Judicial Notice (06.29.25): Unleashed
The end of the SCOTUS Term, Justice Barrett v. Justice Jackson, Emil Bove’s latest controversy, a promising Biglaw merger, and two new litigation boutiques.
This week’s Judicial Notice is sponsored by
Burford Capital helps companies and law firms unlock the value of their legal assets. With a $7.2 billion portfolio and listings on the NYSE and LSE, Burford provides capital to finance high-value commercial litigation and arbitration—without adding cost or risk or giving up control. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and Am Law 100 firms, who turn to Burford to pursue strong claims, manage legal costs, and accelerate recoveries. Learn more at burfordcapital.com.
Last week was fairly low-key for our family. Zach and I participated in the SCOTUSblog live blog on Thursday and Friday, the last two days of the U.S. Supreme Court Term. Harlan enjoyed a week of gymnastics camp. Chase did a lot of building with Magna-Tiles; the brutally hot weather wasn’t conducive to outdoor activities (and unfortunately we don’t have a pool).
It was an eventful week in the world at large. Because Judicial Notice is a news roundup, I’d be remiss in not acknowledging one of the biggest news stories of the past week or so, the U.S. strikes against Iran. And there’s a legal angle: in ordering the attacks, did Donald Trump act lawfully? If you’re looking to read up on that subject, check out the excellent explainers by Charlie Savage in The New York Times or Jess Bravin in The Wall Street Journal (gift links), this Times essay by Professor Oona Hathaway, or this Executive Functions post by Professor Jack Goldsmith.
Now, on to (the rest of) the news.
Lawyer of the Week: Emil Bove.
As I’ve explained countless times, often to irate readers who criticize me for naming someone they detest as Lawyer of the Week, this “award” is bestowed based on who’s making news, generating buzz, or setting tongues wagging—not based on an attorney’s personal virtue or lawyerly skill. So sometimes the Lawyer of the Week is someone who’s been accused of something—which is the case with my latest pick.
Former federal prosecutor turned Trump defense lawyer Emil Bove, currently serving at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) as principal associate deputy attorney general, is no stranger to these pages. He garnered media mentions for his handling of the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in which he allegedly pressured DOJ lawyers to dismiss the case, and for his controversial firings of Department lawyers suspected of disloyalty to Trump, including prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases. Bove then returned to the news in May, after Trump announced that he’d be nominating Bove to a New Jersey seat on the Third Circuit.
And now Bove is back in the headlines again—for a bad reason. As reported by Devlin Barrett of The Times, a dismissed DOJ official, Erez Reuveni, submitted a 35-page whistleblower disclosure to Senate and House Judiciary Committee leaders, the DOJ Inspector General, and the acting head of the Office of Special Counsel. In his disclosure, Reuveni described a March 14 meeting at the DOJ, held to discuss the removal of undocumented immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), in which Bove allegedly said that if courts start blocking AEA removals, the DOJ might need to tell these courts “f** you”—and even start ignoring their orders.
According to Reuveni, in the weeks after this March 14 meeting, he “witnessed and internally reported to his DOJ leadership multiple incidents that led him to reasonably believe the government was in violation of court orders.” He claimed that these reports, as well as his efforts as a government lawyer to get the administration to comply with court orders in cases he was handling, were not well-received. On April 5, Reuveni was placed on administrative leave—and a week later, on April 12, he was fired, ending his 15-year DOJ career.
Reuveni made his whistleblower submission on Tuesday. The very next day, Emil Bove denied these allegations—under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee, at his Wednesday confirmation hearing to serve on the Third Circuit. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) doubted Bove’s denials, telling the nominee, “I am hoping that more evidence is going to come out that showed that you lied before this committee.” Other members of the Emil Bove Fan Club include Barbara McQuade, who described him in Bloomberg Law as “a dangerous pick for the federal bench,” and David French, who wrote in The Times that Bove, if confirmed, “would be a problem for a very long time.”
Evidence relevant to the Reuveni/Bove dispute should exist. Per The Times, Reuveni’s letter “suggests a copious trail of emails, texts, and phone records that would support Mr. Reuveni’s version of events.” And as Ed Whelan noted in National Review, if Reuveni’s account of the March 14 meeting is accurate, there should be more than a half-dozen attendees who can confirm or refute Reuveni’s claims. But whether the SJC has any interest in digging up such evidence—or whether Senate Republicans, even if such evidence does surface, will vote against Bove—remains to be seen.
Other lawyers in the news:
Two prominent lawyers from opposite sides of the political spectrum, Neal Katyal of Milbank and Professor Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, joined the litigation team for VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump, one of the legal challenges to the Trump tariffs. Katyal served as acting solicitor general during the Obama administration, while McConnell was appointed to the Tenth Circuit during the Bush administration. The news was announced by Professor Ilya Somin, who represents VOS Selections alongside lawyers from the Liberty Justice Center.
A New York State appellate court, the Third Department, disbarred Kenneth Chesebro, a former lawyer for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign who was involved in the so-called “fake electors” scheme. The disbarment relied upon Chesebro pleading guilty to a felony in Georgia state court.
Can someone please give the Texas Attorney General’s Office its own reality show already? In the latest episode of this drama, former Texas solicitor general Judd Stone and former assistant attorney general Chris Hilton filed a federal lawsuit against First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster, alleging that he conspired with colleagues “to draft a false and defamatory email that alleges Stone and Hilton engaged in and admitted to sexual harassment.”
A team of lawyers from Gibson Dunn convinced Judge James Selna (C.D. Cal.) to reduce a $553 million verdict to $1 in nominal damages, in a patent-infringement case against their client, Western Digital.
Friday was the last day of not only the latest Supreme Court Term, but also the last day of lawyer turned legal journalist Adam Liptak’s 17-year tenure as Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. Congratulations and thanks to Adam for all his great work over the years, and good luck to him in his next role at The Times—in which he’ll step out of the trenches of day-to-day SCOTUS coverage so he can cover the law more broadly.
In memoriam:
John Henry Lewin Jr., a retired partner and former head of litigation at Venable, passed away at 85.
Allen D. Black—a prominent antitrust litigator, founding partner of Fine Kaplan and Black in Philadelphia, and leader within the American Law Institute (ALI)—passed away at 82.
May they rest in peace.
Judges of the Week: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
“It turns out that this isn’t the 6–3, conservatives-always-win court many expected,” said Professor Lee Epstein to Adam Liptak and Abbie VanSickle of The Times (gift link). “This is the Roberts–Barrett–Kavanaugh Court—conservative justices who usually push the Court to the right, but not always.”
If you haven’t done so already, download and flip through SCOTUSblog’s fantastic Stat Pack, a compilation of fascinating statistics about October Term 2024 prepared by Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman. The three justices most frequently in the majority in the Term just ended were Chief Justice John Roberts (95 percent), Justice Brett Kavanaugh (92 percent), and Justice Amy Coney Barrett (89 percent).
And OT 2024 isn’t an outlier. As noted by The Times, Justice Kavanaugh has been in the majority 89 percent of the time since joining the Court—a higher rate than any justice since at least 1953. And Justice Barrett, at 84 percent, is tied for second with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy—who was widely acknowledged as the Court’s crucial “swing vote” before his retirement in 2018.
So whether you believe or don’t believe in the “3-3-3 Court,” it’s fair to say that Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett lie at the center of the Court jurisprudentially and exercise the greatest influence over the outcomes of cases, especially the most controversial and closely divided ones. If you’re a SCOTUS advocate and can persuade two out of these three, you’re pretty much going to win.
In addition to their influence, reflected in the data, there are qualitative reasons for recognizing this trio as Judges of the Week. The Chief formed a “tag team” of sorts with Justice Barrett in the critically important CASA v. Trump case, in which the Court essentially put the kibosh on so-called universal injunctions. As Joan Biskupic of CNN put it, “Roberts enlisted Barrett to write the opinion that dissolved one check on the president’s executive power” (even though many of us assumed that the Chief would write CASA himself). I agree with Biskupic that the Chief’s bold decision to assign the opinion to ACB “appeared be a sign of Roberts’s confidence in Barrett, and likely desire to continue working in tandem with a justice who has at times straddled the middle and controlled the outcome of cases.”
Justice Barrett was an obvious contender for Judge of the Week because she wrote the hugely significant CASA opinion (discussed below as Litigation of the Week). And she did so successfully, in terms of (1) holding on to all six conservative justices for the entire opinion, as opposed to having justices opt out of one part or another, and (2) writing an opinion that won praise, at least from people not inclined to hate it for its outcome or bottom line, as “powerful and comprehensive,” as well as “excellent” and “very welcome.” And her awarding this win to the Trump administration might quiet down some of her conservative critics, at least temporarily; it could be described as “an end-of-term rejoinder to the MAGA loudmouths who have been complaining that Justice Barrett is a pushover,” per the WSJ editorial board (gift link, via Howard Bashman’s How Appealing).
Finally, in terms of why he deserves Judge of the Week recognition, Justice Kavanaugh wrote an interesting and important concurrence in CASA. I discuss its substance below, in my write-up of the overall CASA case, because it’s easier to understand in context. For now, I’d just point out that in a sign of its significance, the Kavanaugh CASA concurrence got highlighted by several leading SCOTUS watchers, including Professor Steve Vladeck of One First, Sarah Isgur and David French of Advisory Opinions, and Jason Willick of The Washington Post (gift link).
In nominations news, on Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Trump’s first five judicial nominees of his second term, voting along party lines to send the nominations to the Senate floor. That’s the good news for the administration.
The bad news: federal judges, including Republican appointees eligible to take senior status, “are retiring at a historically slow pace at the onset of President Donald Trump’s second term,” according to a report by Tiana Headley of Bloomberg Law. This could limit his ability to shift the judiciary even farther to the right. And for reasons I shared with Mark Walsh of the ABA Journal earlier this month, I don’t think any of the conservative justices will retire on Trump’s watch this time around.
In memoriam: Judge Virgil Smith, the first African-American chief judge of Wayne County Circuit Court, Michigan, passed away at 77. May he rest in peace.
Job of the Week: an opportunity for a midlevel labor and employment associate.
Lateral Link is working with one of its longstanding clients, a leading Am Law 100 firm, on a new search for a midlevel labor and employment associate. This nationally respected firm seeks candidates with 3 to 5 years of experience in employment litigation, including class actions, as well as traditional labor matters such as NLRA issues, collective-bargaining agreements, and wage-and-hour compliance. The ideal candidate will have trained at a Chambers-ranked L&E group and possess strong writing, client counseling, and case management skills. The firm is widely recognized for its culture and consistently earns “Best Law Firm to Work For” accolades, making this a compelling option for attorneys seeking both prestige and work-life balance. To learn more, please contact Regional Leader Vered Krasna at vkrasna@laterallink.com.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Original Jurisdiction to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.