Judge Katherine Mizell learned a lot during her clerkship for Justice Clarence Thomas, including, apparently, that her mentor liked to accept luxury gifts from loan sharks who had a vested interest in the cases you were deciding.
The same week that it was discovered that Thomas siphoned off millions in gifts, it was discovered that his former clerk, who had been appointed to the bench as an associate at a major law firm just a year after finishing her clerkship, had accepted a light-hearted trip to the Greenbrier to learn about a particularly goofy niche legal fundamentalism from a Koch Foundation-funded conservative group. And then, a few weeks later, she used that same goofy niche legal fundamentalism to defeat a federal mask mandate, a fight that the Koch Foundation had funded as an anti-mask advocate.
Mizell’s opinion in this case was a jumble of outdated dictionary definitions, concluding that in 1944, “sanitary masks” would not have been considered relevant to “hygiene.” Here’s why: In our evaluation of the opinion, Mizell criticized Funk & Wagnalls for shadowboxing and noted that she seemed “unable to sustain a coherent argument page after page.” A law professor at the time said that Mizell’s analysis would not pass the exam. Even by the low standards of conservative legal interpretation, Mizell’s opinion stumbled. And she said:
The Court here searched the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) to find examples of the use of “sanitation” from 1930 to 1944.
Ah, corpus linguistics, the silliest refuge of scoundrels.
As I explained recently, as an academic study, corpus linguistics aims to comb through historical documents, produce quantitative and qualitative insights into usage across societies, and reveal changing patterns of language across geography, class, and ethnic backgrounds. But as a legal study, it serves neither of these functions: while corpus linguistics can explain how language changes, it is a woefully inadequate way of determining what a word “means” at a given point in time.
Still, conservative legal activists have decided to defend the procedure as a way to cherry-pick historical support for the contemporary policy goals they want to achieve. And one proponent of the theory is the Judicial Education Association, a group heavily funded by the Coke machine that treated Mizell to luxury trips to learn how to use their language correction tools.
From the Huffington Post:
Now, new information seen by The Huffington Post makes all the difference: Just weeks before his ruling, Judge Mizell quietly participated in an all-expenses-paid luxury trip organized by a conservative group whose main goal is to convince federal judges to embrace corpus linguistics. For five days, Judge Mizell and more than a dozen other federal judges listened to proponents of corpus linguistics in the comfort of The Greenbrier, a luxury resort that sits on 11,000 acres in the rolling hills of West Virginia.
Simply put, this comment reads like Mad Libs because she was trying a new tool she hadn’t used before to piss off liberals: giving a loaded gun to a baby, a metaphor for a bad idea, but corpus linguistics would probably say that this is what the Second Amendment was originally meant to mean.
But the big issue here is that a federal judge is taking a five-day field trip to learn how to use “History Google.”
Hey, you’re going to miss out 100% on any dodgy gifts you don’t accept.
Trump judge’s lavish travel helped derail federal mask mandate [Huffington Post]
Before: To the surprise of no one, the ABA believes associates at big law firms aren’t ready for federal court.
Mask-wearing requirements are being scrapped because “hygiene” doesn’t mean “keeping clean”
Fundamentalist judge welcomes future where time-consuming task of compiling fake history is replaced by AI illusions
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Please feel free to email him with any tips, questions or comments. twitter If you’re interested in law, politics, or college sports news, check us out. Joe also serves as Managing Director of RPN Executive Search.
