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blog 3.5 Trump & Circuit Courts

1. The district court is a trial court within the Ninth Circuit; the appellate court is one step higher on the ladder and oversees all individual districts.2. the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the appellate court to which the case proceeds now. (The district court is a trial court within the Ninth Circuit; the appellate court is one step higher on the ladder and oversees all individual districts.)3.The Court’s reputation arguably derives from its transformation under President Jimmy Carter. While Carter was the only the fourth president to make no appointments to the Supreme Court, he did appoint 15 people to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, out of 23 judges total at the time. (It’s since expanded.)4. Stephen Reinhardt, a Carter appointee who’s still serving, is widely viewed as one of the most liberal appellate judges on federal courts. He wrote the Ninth Circuit’s opinion striking down California’s same-sex marriage ban Proposition 8 in 2012, ruled that the Second Amendment doesn’t recognize an individual right to bear arms, and argued that bans on assisted suicide are unconstitutional.He also joined in one of the court’s most notorious rulings in 2002, in which Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote that the Pledge of Allegiance’s “under God” clause is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.5.The Ninth Circuit’s trajectory over time is represented by the bottom left chart below; when the line goes lower, it means the court is getting more liberal; when it goes higher, it means the court is getting more conservative.6.But it reversed 87 percent of Sixth Circuit rulings, and 85 percent of 11th Circuit rulings, both of which are notably more conservative courts than the Ninth.7.Of course, these measures are about the appeals court, and despite Trump directing his ire at the circuit level, the DACA decision that set him up is at a district level. It’ll be a while yet before the case and related challenges to Trump’s DACA decision-making filter up to the Supreme Court and become part of the Ninth Circuit’s overall reversal (or nonreversal) statistics.

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