Judicial Notice (06.22.25): Please Don’t Call The Judge ‘Honey’
The most important SCOTUS case of the Term, the latest ABA lawsuit against Trump, and a major partner hire by Latham out of Wachtell.
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I hope you had a happy and meaningful Juneteenth, replete with time to reflect on the end of slavery in the United States. And I’m honored to share my birthday with this holiday—but now that I’m 50, I’m perfectly happy to ignore my birthday going forward (or pretend that I’m turning 35, over and over and over again).
Kidding aside, I’m very grateful to everyone for their kind birthday wishes. Apologies if I have not yet responded personally to your greetings—I fell behind in my communications in the very busy lead-up to my hitting the big 5-0, and I haven’t managed to catch up—but please know that I’m deeply appreciative.
Now, on to the news.
Lawyer of the Week: the “honey” lawyer.
Many of you have done so already (because the moment went viral), but in case you haven’t, take 30 seconds to watch this video clip from TikTok—with the sound on.
Yes, that’s right: a (male) lawyer arguing before the Colorado Court of Appeals addressed a (female) judge as “honey.” I left the practice of law almost two decades ago, but even I know that you shouldn’t address a judge as “honey” (unless you’re not in a courtroom and married to said judge).
On Bluesky, George Conway quipped, “Wait till he gets home and has to explain to his wife, ‘Your Honor, I didn’t mean to call the judge ‘honey.’” On Above the Law, Joe Patrice pointed out, “You can't spell ‘Your Honor’ without ‘Hon...’”
On TikTok, Bluesky, and Reddit, viewer reactions ran the gamut. Some found it humorous; others found it horrifying. Observers also disagreed on whether this was “just a stupid slip-up in a stressful moment” or a Freudian slip by someone “trying so hard to pretend that [he’s] not a misogynist pig.”
Immediately realizing his mistake, the mortified lawyer quickly—and profusely—apologized. Later on in the argument (just not in the clip that went viral), the attorney said he was sorry yet again—and the jurist in question, Judge Elizabeth Harris, graciously accepted his apology.
Speaking for myself, I’m inclined to agree with Joe Patrice: “this really didn’t feel like a calculated act of condescension,” but was probably “an instinctual verbal reflex that springs from having every one of the most challenging arguments of his life with his partner.” So I’m not going to be too hard on the attorney; the embarrassment is probably punishment enough. (And I’ve intentionally not named him, so as not to further mar his Google footprint.)
Readers, what do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Other lawyers in the news:
Donald Trump officially nominated Jeanine Pirro, a former New York State prosecutor and judge turned Fox News host, to serve as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro is currently serving in the role on an interim basis.
The prosecution filed its response to former Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein’s motions to dismiss the federal criminal case against him, which involves allegations of tax evasion, willful failure to pay taxes, and making false statements on a loan application.
Speaking of tax prosecutions, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to eliminate the Tax Division, parceling out its enforcement work between other civil and criminal DOJ components.
Kyle Friesen and Charles Kelley—a former associate and current partner, respectively, at Mayer Brown—persuaded the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to “reform” the death sentence of Larry Estrada, an intellectually disabled, 46-year-old man, to a sentence of life imprisonment.
In memoriam: Terry Louise Fisher—a Los Angeles prosecutor who went on to a successful career in the entertainment industry, serving as a co-creator of L.A. Law—passed away at 79. May she rest in peace.
Judge of the Week: Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
If you joined Zach and me for the SCOTUSblog live blogs last Wednesday and Friday—and by the way, please join us for the next one, on Thursday, June 26, starting at 9:30 a.m.—you know that Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn’t hold back in United States v. Skrmetti. Regarded by many as the biggest case of the Term, Skrmetti is a constitutional challenge to Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatments for transgender minors (discussed in more detail below as Ruling of the Week).
Justice Sotomayor wrote what Abbie VanSickle described in The New York Times as a “scathing” dissent in Skrmetti, then “took the rare step of reading her dissent from the bench”—”a move typically reserved to emphasize a justice’s extreme displeasure with a decision.” And in both her written dissent and summary from the bench, the justice “indicated that she dissented ‘[i]n sadness’”—”and without qualifying the phrase ‘I dissent’ with the traditional ‘respectfully,’” as Amy Howe noted in SCOTUSblog.
In the opening of her dissent—which was, at 31 pages, seven pages longer than Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court—Justice Sotomayor accused the majority, which upheld the Tennessee law, of “retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most” and “abandon[ing] transgender children and their families to political whims.” In her conclusion, she claimed that the Court’s opinion “authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them”—an outcome for which “there is no constitutional justification.”
In remarks last year at Harvard University, Justice Sotomayor revealed that “there are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried. There have been those days.” And then she added—perhaps presciently—“there are likely to be more.”
Across social media, Justice Sotomayor’s open acknowledgment of her sorrow elicited a range of responses. Some commended what they viewed as her courage and candor; others criticized her for inappropriately bringing her personal feelings into the enterprise of judging. If you have views you’d like to share about whether and when it’s appropriate for judges to acknowledge their emotions as they go about their work, please share them, in the comments.
In other news about judges and the judiciary:
Justice Sotomayor wasn’t the only member of the Court to give her colleagues a piece of her mind. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote what Kimberly Robinson and Lydia Wheeler described in Bloomberg Law as “two pointed dissents”—one in Stanley v. City of Sanford, the other in Diamond Alternative Energy, LLC v. EPA—in which she “called textualism ‘incessantly malleable’ and accused her colleagues of giving the perception that the Supreme Court favors moneyed interests over ordinary citizens.”
Speaking of Justice Jackson, the justices’ latest financial disclosures revealed that she received more than $2 million in book-related payments from Penguin Random House, which published her bestselling memoir, Lovely One. For more tidbits from the disclosures, see SCOTUSblog or The Times.
Over the past few Terms, I’ve been paying close attention to Justice Jackson and the next most-junior member of the Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. So I was intrigued to read this fascinating profile of Justice Barrett by Jodi Kantor of The Times (gift link)—which revealed, among other things, that Justice Barrett voted against the Court hearing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (even though, in the end, she joined the majority in overruling Roe v. Wade).
I’m guessing that Justices Jackson and Barrett will be the junior justices for at least a few more years. As I told Mark Walsh, who wrote an article for the ABA Journal about possible SCOTUS retirements at the end of this Term, I believe the chances of Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito stepping down during Trump’s term have been greatly exaggerated.
Justice Barrett wasn’t the only jurist who was the subject of a detailed profile last week. Zach Montague wrote about Judge William G. Young (D. Mass.), the 84-year-old Reagan appointees who’s handling multiple Trump-related cases, also for The Times (gift link).
Don’t address a judge as “honey,” and don’t stick your chewed gum to the underside of counsel table—lest it get stuck to the skirt of the next lawyer to sit at that table, incurring the ire of Judge T. Kent Wetherell II (N.D. Fla.). For more on “Gumgate”—yes, the (non-lawyer) perpetrator ‘fessed up, after Judge Wetherell issued an order to show cause—check out Law360 or listen to Advisory Opinions (starting around 01:16:55).
In nominations news:
Donald Trump plans to nominate Chad Meredith—former solicitor general of Kentucky, now a partner in the Cincinnati office of Squire Patton Boggs—to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. As some of you might recall, Meredith was almost nominated during the Biden administration, as part of a deal with then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—but that deal fell apart.
Judge Ed Artau of Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal, nominated by Trump to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, could face some tough questions at his confirmation hearing. According to Politico, Judge Artau was actively seeking a judicial nomination from the Trump administration while at the same time hearing a case brought by Trump—in which Judge Artau ruled in Trump’s favor, a few weeks before his nomination was announced.
In memoriam: Judge Patricia Broderick—who was paralyzed in a car accident, then went on to serve as an assistant U.S. attorney and eventually a Superior Court judge in the District of Columbia (1998-2020)—passed away at 75. May she rest in peace.
Job of the Week: an opportunity for a private-funds lawyer in Atlanta.
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