Sarah Isgur
Welcome to Advisory Opinions. I’m Sarah Isgur, that’s David French, and on today’s episode, we are digging into the nine-page settlement agreement between the Department of Justice and Donald Trump, uh, and the $1.776 billion that has been withdrawn from the general fund. Say what now? We’ll dig into all of the ways in which this could be legal, could have been done, is it legal? Everything involved in that. We will also talk about the Supreme Court’s latest cert grant in brief, Title IX. Does it apply to employees or just students? And the Georgia Supreme Court race finishes out strong, but don’t worry because we have cases from the Sixth Circuit and the 11th Circuit, a kind of circuit split brewing about the First Amendment and judicial elections. We’ll weigh in on that too. And David, I just have to tell you, I spoke to the judges of the Southern District of New York yesterday, and I got an SDNY tote bag, and it is my new prized possession. So if you ever see me out in the wild, I’m gonna be carrying an SDNY tote bag so proudly, and if you don’t know this, um, the Southern District of New York is sometimes called the Sovereign District of New York because Maine justice folks take a little umbrage at the, uh, SDNY US Attorney’s Office for acting too independently in the SDNY US Attorney’s Office. Um, I’m sure they have all sorts of derisive names for Maine justice, uh, but I just think that someone out there should make a Sovereign District of New York tote bag, and then I can have dueling SDNY tote bags. But an exciting day for me in New York. More to come on Advisory Opinions. Well, David, we did get a list of orders this week, and there was one new cert grant from the Supreme Court. Reading here from Amy Howe’s write-up on SCOTUSblog, the court granted review in Crowther versus Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. The case began as a pair of lawsuits filed by an art professor and a women’s basketball coach at two public universities in Georgia, both alleging that they had been the victim of sex discrimination. The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit threw out their claims. In an opinion by Chief Judge William Pryor, that court concluded that employees cannot bring lawsuits under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination by schools that receive federal funding. Pryor pointed to the text of the statute, which provides that, quote, “No person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Nothing about that language, he wrote, indicates congressional intent to provide a private right of action to employees of educational institutions. So David, they’ll hear that case in the fall. We’ll obviously cover it when there’s oral argument. I am loathe to disagree with Chief Judge Bill Pryor of the 11th Circuit, and I think he, generally speaking, has his pulse on this Supreme Court. He sort of is a Jeff Sutton-esque figure for me. Um, he’s one of those elder statesmen of the circuit courts that easily could have been a Supreme Court justice, you know, with different timing and different luck. You know, fun fact, it was actually, you know, at the end of the day, kind of a Pryor versus Gorsuch battle for that opening. Um, Gorsuch obviously won. I’ve sort of talked about the role that former clerks play in those sort of, uh, showdowns privately behind the scenes, and it can turn into a bit of a clerk brawl. The, the Pryor clerks felt like they brought, you know, a knife to a gunfight type thing, um, when it came to that, that moment in time back then. Nevertheless, like, yeah, I, I don’t know. Like, first blush, David, I’m inclined to think Pryor’s just right about this one, that if Congress had meant to make sort of educational institutions just this separate thing for their employees but not any other types of employees get that benefit, that would seem weird to me.