"Citing the fictional sport from the watershed comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, Jackson wrote 'Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.' As a dissent in yet another shadow docket decision allowing the administration to take arbitrary and capricious action free from the constraints of either statute or judicial oversight, the Calvinball analogy hit home."
"With conservatives needing some quasi-scholarly cover after Jackson's withering critique, GWU Law professor and MAGA pullstring toy Jonathan Turley gave himself a half-assed crash course in Calvin & Hobbes lore and delivered his retort with a bumbling thud. Turley could've written 'no, you are!' without sacrificing intellectual heft. It's an embarrassing gaslighting effort, which is saying a lot when we're talking about Turley."
Justice Jackson labeled the conservative majority's approach 'Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,' using a rule-free fictional sport to condemn ad hoc decisionmaking. She identified a pattern of no fixed rules combined with consistent administration victories. The critique targeted shadow docket rulings that allow administrative actions without normal statutory limits or judicial oversight. Justice Gorsuch proposed a new admonition to lower courts about converting temporary shadow-docket relief into controlling precedent, a novel and questionable rule. Conservative defenders produced strained rebuttals, and in Stanley v. City of Sanford the Court required plaintiffs to be 'qualified' for positions before claiming discrimination.
Read at Above the Law
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]