Advisory Opinions - There Is No Historic Defeat for Civil Rights

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Sarah Isgur, on a whirlwind booktour, takes a break to deliver the legal goods with David French. The two discuss a Washington Post piece on civil rights data during the Trump era, Chiles v. Salazar, and free speech and AI liability in child porn. The Agenda:–Sarah on The View–David’s beef with WaPo piece on civil rights data –AI liability–Book restrictions in Iowa–Iowa law prevents schools from providing instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation– Religious challenge to vaccine mandates–Contract cases and undue influence Show Notes:–Federal appeals court upholds West Virginia school vaccine law–Chiles v. Salazar (conversion therapy) Order Sarah’s book here, Advisory Opinions is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ready? I was born ready. Welcome to advisory opinions. I'm Sarah Isker. That's David French. And we are here with an exciting episode where we will go behind the scenes of The View, where I talked about the Supreme Court

in front of a live TV audience. You don't get to say that every day, as well as walk through a new Washington Post story where the headline enraged us. And then we will talk about questions you guys had about child's and the conversion therapy case as it applies to abortion and restrictions on what doctors can say or must say in the context of abortion providers, as well as AI. I mean, how wrong can David be? Like, you guys are so up in arms about this. So let's see

if you can answer some of your analogies. Is AI more like Excel, more like Adobe Photoshop? You sent them all, and I really appreciate it. And we, we, We will continue circuit extravaganza, moving now to the Eighth Circuit and the Fourth Circuit. Are you required to have a religious exemption for your vaccine mandate for students in public school? Let's find out on advisory opinions. All right, David, we are recording this. I have just wrapped up going on The View. I am still standing.

I not only survive, David, I have. a great time. Yeah, tell us about it, Sarah. Now, I've watched it, and I thought you did a fantastic job, but like give us the flavor, the color, like the play by play, the people want to know. I was disappointed because I knew that if we had had just a little bit more time, we were going to, like, get to talk about some of the more sort of gossipy parts of the book, Justice Kagan playing poker and stuff like that, and we ran out of time. So that is the bad part. But the good part was, and what you couldn't see on air, you know, the view host that I was sort of like most trepidacious of was sunny, right? Because she's a lawyer. And I was seated next to her and I was like,

oh, no, this could, who knows? And instead, like, she's the one plugging Scotus blog. And she was so, so kind to me when I sat down and we were, you know, if you actually pay really close attention, we're talking when the camera starts rolling for the segment. And then the the second the camera's off again were like, you know, chit-chatting. And it was just, they were so generous. So it was actually really fun. I had a good time. And I loved getting to explain the Supreme Court to the audience.

And the second I'm explaining that, like, actually we're blaming the wrong branch and, like, you know, point to Congress. All I see are heads nodding in the audience. Once you give people even the simplest explanation of this, they're like, oh, totally. Sorry. Yeah, I get that now. Yeah, it like makes perfect sense to people. Oh, totally. It's like an 80, 20 sort of understanding issue, right?

I mean, but I also thought it was very, because the crowd is pretty, it's a pretty liberal crowd. And so, you know, they might have a little side eye you walking in, but you did something I thought that was pretty smart to like establish your independence when you said, you know, there are just so many ways Trump could lose the birthright citizenship case. And then you could almost feel this like, oh. I like this person. This person might say something I really find interesting.

You know, the only other show that I really do with a live audience is Bill Maher. And it does change how you approach the whole thing. Because, like, you've now got three audiences. It's like a three-body problem. You've got the people you're talking to on stage. You've got the audience that's in the studio. And you've got the audience that's watching. And everyone will tell you, like, in media training, like, well, the audience watching is the biggest audience.

So, like, that's the only one you should focus on. But the other two audiences affect that audience. That's the whole point. That's the three body problem. And the other two audiences are right in front of you. So every cell in your body is saying, I'm responding to this audience. It's right in front of me. But, yeah, Bill Maher, real time is like a trigger phrase for me, Sarah, because I'm, you know, I'm gumming.

I'm, you know, I'm scheduled to go back for the first time in years, but it was probably the original time I did it might have been like my worst media appearance in five to 10 years. And it's not that I did anything really embarrassing. It's just that it was so thoroughly pedestrian that I think people might have had fallen into a coma of boredom just during when I was speaking. Speaking of falling into a coma, David, we got an email from a listener. who says that they listen to you because your voice is so calming while they sleep. That was something else. So I'm going to choose Sarah to take that as a compliment,

that in difficult troubled times that the sound of my voice is reassuring enough that somebody can like drift off to sleep. So I'm going to take it in the positive sense and not in the negative sense of you are so boring, you put me to sleep. I'll put it in so calming that my soul feels at peace versus so boring I can't keep my eyes open. It's 50-50 how to interpret that. And I'll take it the positive 50%. That's what we do here. We're glass half full people. I want to get to some listener emails and questions that we have before we get to part two of circuit extravaganza. The first was a listener who asked us to weigh in. on this Washington Post piece.

Here's the headline. Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights. The court is the first since at least the 50s to reject claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities. This is by Justin Juvenal, and there's another couple lines in here.

The court has entered a new era of extreme partisanship. None of the past seven decades has been as starkly polarized. David, you've got some beef with this piece. Would you like to start the beefing? I've got some pretty good beef with it. So let's just look at the actual numbers. So if you want to go back, it was the Warren Court from 53 to 69, where 74% of rulings

were pro-civil rights, okay? Look at the dates. 53 to 69, okay? You are dismantling Jim Crow at this point. I'm surprised it's not higher than 74%. I mean, the comprehensive way in which American law in the 1950s and early 1960s discriminated against black Americans, discriminated against women is not, let's just put it this way.

It is unrecognizable to us today. It's hard to wrap our minds around it, us today. Now then let's look at the percentage after. Can I note that, by the way, that the denominator? So 74% of 192 cases. Because the denominator is going to be important later on. Then you go to the Burger Court, 69 to 86. 52%.

Then the risk, 52% of 465. Then you get to 52% in the Rehnquist Court of 274. Then you get to the Roberts Court, 52% of 159. Now you get to Roberts 2, and it's 44% of, 50. So it's a lot smaller sample size. And by the way, the difference between 52%, the 52% that existed from 69 to 2020, which for those keeping scored home is 51 years, that's 52, 52, 52, and then you go four years with a much smaller sample size that's 44, which is not a giant difference, guys. It's not a giant difference. And I haven't seen the detail of the study,

but I do wonder, like for example, it says justice has also paired back civil rights in other cases, most notably in striking down affirmative action in college admissions. Do you want to say it, or do I want to say it? Striking down race discrimination isn't anti-civil rights ruling, guys. Also, to be clear, remember the plaintiffs in that case were Asian Americans. So it's a within the margin of error, you know, so to speak, you know, it was 52% out of 1,000 cases for 50 years. And then it's 44% out of 50 cases over four years at a time when the number of cases has dropped per year. The number of cases the court takes has dropped. You, of course, have the fact that the court decides which cases to take in the first place. So it's not a random sample set, if that makes sense. Like, not only to your point, David, that like the civil rights movement isn't random, you know, obviously in the warrant court era, but the court chooses which cases to take, and it's based on the circuit splits and where the problems and disagreements in the law are,

that's going to change over time. And again, it doesn't seem to be much of a change at all for this blaring headline that civil rights have been decimated and this is the most partisan court ever. And some of the cases, so for example, the ruling against the Colorado law banning conversion therapy, I just think there is a very big difference between saying civil rights have lost on the merits versus civil rights colliding with the First Amendment. Because then you rule the other direction and you might say Roberts Court less hospitable to the First Amendment, right? Oh man, that's what I used to do as an opposition researcher.

No matter which way you voted, like for puppies or for kids. kittens. I would say you voted against kittens or against puppies. So, like, that's exactly what I used to do is you voted against civil rights or you voted against the First Amendment. And, like, I would hit you either way. And you're right, David, so they included, I actually can't, they mentioned Childs, but I can't tell if Childs is included in the denominator of the 50 cases, but Childs 303 creative, where you have civil rights going up against a First Amendment interest. And also, you know, they also try to track conservative rulings by Chief Justice era. Now, this isn't interesting. Where does Childs fit? Where does a First Amendment case fit in a, quote, unquote, conservative ruling court? Because the First Amendment to me seems to be an ideology free zone in this sense. I mean, it's not an ideology free zone, but only in this sense, which is, I've been doing First Amendment free speech law for, I think the first case I volunteered on was 1990.

So here we are. It is 34 years later. And here's what I've seen. When outside observers see you rule for a liberal who's speaking freely, that is a liberal ruling. When outsiders see you rule for conservative who's speaking, that's a conservative ruling. No, it's not. So what is it? It's a First Amendment ruling. Is that conservative? Is that liberal? Well, man, it depends on who's in power and what is the salience of that ideology in the moment. Because when I was coming, up as a young conservative, especially on campus, we had free speech was our issue, man. And then now, as you see the free speech assault on campus from the Trump administration, free speech is much more of a liberal issue. I mean, it just does flip back and forth. And so, you know, I look at

these things and it feels inflammatory without being illuminating. So in the chart about conservative rulings by Chief Justice era, Berger will start with 1969 again, 54% conservative out of 2200 cases. Rehnquist 53% out of, this is kind of fun, 1776 cases, Roberts 1, 51% out of 982 cases, Roberts 2, 54% out of 270 cases. Those all look identical to me, basically. Like, again, especially when you keep in mind the problems that you're pointing out. First, there's the denominator problem. There's these don't easily all code, conservative or liberal, And this is often the problem with some of the social science in these areas. The coding itself is imbued with value-based judgments.

You know, like, are they basing it on the plaintiff or are they basing it on the judicial issue at hand? And are they deciding which one they're basing it on based on their own choices, basically? So in 303 creative, it's based on the plaintiff. But in this other case, it's based on the fact that it's a Voting Rights Act case, for instance, or something like that. And it's like, well, you can't, if you're picking and choosing, whether it's based on the plaintiff or something else, that's not objective.

That's you deciding whether you think it's conservative coded or, you know, judicial issue coded, so to speak. Well, and, you know, so many things, like, let's just talk for a minute about an issue we may be revisiting really soon in this podcast. That's a hint of potential future guest. The ruling regarding Native American tribes in Oklahoma. Justice Gorsuch's ruling, essentially. granting a lot more sovereignty to Native Americans, is that a liberal ruling or is that a

conservative ruling? If you're talking about political coalitions, since Native Americans, I believe, tend to vote more Democratic, you might say, well, since a liberal democratic constituency won, it's a liberal ruling. But it's a ruling rooted in the original public meaning of the constitution and various treaties. So is that a conservative ruling because it's an originalist writing it? A lot of these things just don't code very neatly down one side of the aisle or other. The one area that I did think that was actually was religion. Oh my God. You took the words out of my mouth.

It's like, okay, we have crapped on two of these pieces of data, but the third piece of data is really interesting and I think actually illuminating about the court itself. This is the percent of pro-religion votes by party of appointing president. And there's just no question that the Democratic percentage, you know, Democratic appointees ruling for the pro-religious side has stayed about the same over time. You see a slight uptick in Roberts 2, but not too much. We're in, you know, the 42 to 58 percentage category the whole time. But the percentage for the Republican-appointed nominees ticks up a lot, you know, Warren to Burger, to Rehnquist, to Roberts 1, to Roberts 2. That is interesting.

to me. Well, and you also see that in the results. So it has been, oh gosh, when was CLSV Martinez decided? You know, it's been, I think since 2010 that we've had a significant loss for religious liberty at the Supreme Court. That's a long time. And that is because the Republican-nominated majority has been very friendly to religious free exercises, assertions or religious free exercise. But Sarah, and we've talked about that at length. I mean, it's been forever since there was a significant religious liberty loss. But it's very interesting to be. If you look at the blue-red difference, the red was always at least a little bit more friendly towards religion, but it's not like the blue was just crapping on it. I mean, if your lowest percentage is 41 or 42 percent, and your highest percentage is

almost 60, like 57-58%, that means if you were a religious plaintiff going in or a religious petitioner going into the Supreme Court, you were going to win even the blue votes about half the time, which utterly is contradictory to a lot of the hysterical rhetoric you see every four years that the entire fate of religious freedom of the church is at stake. No, no. You're going to go from winning maybe 97% of the time if you had blue Supreme Court to almost 60% of the time under current numbers. Guys, I might agree with the 97% more than I agree with the 60%, but it's not the apocalypse, the distinction between the two. All right, David, speaking of Childs and AI, boy, did we get some emails from you guys.

And I wanted to answer some of them. Okay, so Childs, remember, this is conversion of therapy, and whether a therapist licensed by the state of Colorado can be barred from saying certain things about gender identity and sexual orientation. In this case, whether the state can bar someone from trying to, help someone, for instance, change their sexual orientation or feel comfortable with the sex that they were born as the court 8-1 said, yeah, that's a First Amendment problem. Justice Jackson in the dissent was like, nope, if you're licensed by the state, then everything you're doing

within your profession is conduct, and therefore that trumps the First Amendment issue. There's your 8-1 lineup. We talked about suicide and that we still thought you could have a law saying you can't encourage suicide among minors because that was viewpoint neutral and content-based. And we had several listeners that are like, wait a second, that seems pretty viewpoint-based to me because you are saying you're against suicide rather than being for suicide. But David, I feel like there becomes this sort of level of generality problem, gray area problem between what is a viewpoint neutral discussion versus what is a content neutral discussion? And it's almost more of a spectrum than it is a black and white question.

Yeah. And also, suicide is different. You know, you don't have a right to assisted suicide. We have had criminal prosecutions of people who have tried to manipulate people into suicide. It's a category error to conflate the two is one thing. And the other thing, the other thing, though, this is a consistent theme with a lot of the emails that we got. A lot of emailers seem to have in their mind, here is a definition I have in my brain of conversion therapy. And the thing that I have in my brain is this awful, horrible thing that has really hurt people. And as we said before, the conversion therapy that, you know, has led to such revulsion, rightful revulsion, often included things like electroshock therapy and other kinds of aversion therapy.

that were just brutal. And so people who hear the words conversion therapy, it puts in their mind a thing. But the thing you have in your mind is not what is in the statute. Let me put it this way. If you send us an email and it just says conversion therapy means XYZ, that's telling me you haven't read the statute. So send an email that says attempting to change behaviors,

which was part of the statute. that attempting to change behaviors is going to be an abusive malpractice kind of, it's a malpractice order abuse by a therapist. And I'm sorry, I just don't see that. I don't see that. So that's sort of a meta commentary on the questions, because 99% of the questions seem to be taking conversion therapy as a thing that the correspondent had in their minds.

And what they probably have in their minds is this very brutal, awful thing that any given aspect of it would either be, A, easily banable, like electroshock therapy, or easily malpractice. Like if you're suing over electroshock therapy. But I'll say it again,

the statute isn't confined to those things. And so when it's not, you have to wrestle with those things that are encompassed in the statute. All right, David, we got a lot of questions for Childs, applying this to abortion. So let me start with this one. In Planned Parenthood versus Rounds,

the Eighth Circuit upheld a law requiring abortion providers to tell patients that an abortion terminates the life of a whole separate, unique, living human being and that the woman has an existing relationship with the fetus protected by the U.S. Constitution. This case did not get appealed. Do you believe the conservatives on the court would have cited? with the physicians and overturned the law. If we agree that Childs was correctly decided, does it follow that rounds was decided incorrectly? Compelled speech seems similarly problematic to me in both contexts, but I would value your perspective on why they might be viewed differently.

So here's my view on mandatory disclosure laws, and it's the same on abortion as like anything else. Requiring the disclosure of known side effects of treatment, such as before you go under anesthesia, you need to know there is a non-zero chance you will never come out of anesthesia. That is something that is worth knowing before you agree to anesthesia, for example. It allows you to make an informed decision. There's an entire category of malpractice liability and litigation around a lack of informed consent. If you're not notified of known material dangers to a procedure, there's going to be a problem. However, so if you're going to require, require disclosure that say an abortion bill could cause, I haven't looked at the side effects,

but, you know, so I'm just saying this, excessive bleeding, but just, just for the sake of argument, excessive bleeding. Yes, you would do that in the same way that you require disclosure of side effects, like of, you know, medications you see on television where, you know, people are running through on the beach talking about this or that, you know, how this, how this medication changed their lives and restored their mobility. And then you have, oh, by the way, you also might die from explosive diarrhea. Like, that is not a violation of free speech rights under normal commercial speech principles. By the way, this is a similar thing to like why you can force companies to put calorie counts on their menus in certain states. We've said, like,

those companies have sued and said, you're violating our free speech rights and they've been like, it's factual information. But like this on a spectrum, right? On the one end of the spectrum is at abortion has certain medical risk like bleeding, which is a known, agreed upon risk. Maybe next on that spectrum, if you agree with me, David, are claims about abortion breast cancer links or elevated suicide risks that some states require as disclosures, but that some major medical organizations dispute. What about that? Yeah, that's a very good question. I would say if you have a, it all depends on the strength of the evidence. I think you would have a, you would have to have a fact-based determination on the strength of the evidence. And the,

the bottom line is the legislature is going to be given a degree of deference to make a tough call. But if you're just making stuff up, no. And then if you do something like a David French approved message, which would be, this is a human being created in the image of God, worthy of protection, both morally and legally, from conception until natural death. That would be a viewpoint when I hold strongly, but it would be a viewpoint that would be not able to be compelled by the government. So that's the next, that's the end, on the other end of the spectrum, that's the rounds case. The quote is, it terminates the life of a, quote, whole separate, unique, living human being. That is not a risk to you, a medical risk to performing this medical

procedure. So you're saying, if we're keeping with Childs and they had appealed that to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court had granted cert, they would have to strike down that law. I think so. I think so. I totally agree. 100%. I don't like a, yep. Yeah. I mean, I think that's just a spectrum. One end's very easy. The other end is very easy. The middle ones, as you say, David, I think you get deference to the state legislature within reason. If it's a medical, assessment or medical judgment, yeah, you give deference within reason. But if it is a declaration of values, the deference diminishes dramatically to the point of no difference. All right, David, when we get back from this commercial break, we will go to AI because if we got

lots of questions about childs and abortion, let me tell you how many emails we got on AI with all of the analogies and metaphors. And guys, I just, I love it so much. because so many of you were not lawyers, but you were thinking exactly like a lawyer. You were doing great A-plus law student work here, and you should all be really proud of yourselves. And, David, you'll note that email that I read, I just, I really loved the way that it ended about that rounds case, and I'm just going to repeat it again. Compelled speech seems similarly problematic to me in both contexts, but I would value your perspective on why they might be viewed differently. That is a curious, well-sent email.

I love A.O. listeners, thank you. So when we get back, we're going to do it for AI. All right, David, questions upon questions upon questions. Last time we were answering a question on AI liability compared to gun liability, and you and I got into a back and forth on that. Follow up, and again, we had so many different analogies from listeners, but I'm going with this one. When someone uses Adobe Photoshop 2025 to make child porn,

everyone understands that the company Adobe does not have any liability for that. It's entirely on the user. When someone uses GROC to make child porn, I find it strange that we would assign liability to AI. I understand that there are cases like, is OpenAI liable when ChatGBTT tells a suicidal person to kill themselves, which are novel legal questions with reasonable arguments to be made, But I thought, who is to blame for software generating images was generally settled.

And I don't see why AI would change that. So under what legal framework is AI different to David, just to be clear? Like they, yeah, all of these are to you. Let me try to explain like this. Let's use an offline example. If I buy canvas and paint brushes and I paint, use the canvas and the paint brushes to, to paint life-like child sexual abuse material, you can't sue Hobby Lobby for selling me the canvas and the paintbrushes.

Or if I send an image to a printer and the printer reproduces the image I send, you can't sue Hewlett-Packard because their printer printed the image I sent. If I hire a portrait artist to create a portrait of child sex abuse material, that portrait cannot create a portrait of child sex abuse material even though I'm hiring them to do it. or a photographer to create it. They can't do it, even though I'm hiring them to do it. The AI, Adobe Paint is more like the canvas and the paintbrush. AI actually does the whole thing like the portrait painter.

It's like you walk, that's part of the appeal of AI, is it does the work for you. So it's like walking into the lobby of a store and saying to the AI, Hello, Mr. Chat. I here's the product I want you to create for me today. And then it's just like a portrait painter that AI does it. And that's what makes AI so compelling is that it doesn't depend on your artistry. Like if I have Adobe Paint Shop, I've still got to be a pretty decent artist. But the other day, I asked Gemini to do a picture of one of my best friends in wizard robes walking with the cane.

And it did it. And I have no artistic ability, but I was able to send a. picture of my friend in wizard robes, and it was so high quality, he wants to blow it up, put in his office maybe. And so that's the difference. It's the same analogy, say, with when we talked about school shooting, the manufacturer of the AR-15 isn't responsible for the school shooting. But if I went to Remington and I said, this is an awful analogy, but go kill somebody, and a Remington employee did it at my request, they've got legal liability. They've got legal liability. That's how to make the distinction between typical software and AI, which is supposed to be operating independently is not exactly the right word, but the whole appeal of it is that it is doing stuff on its own.

It is researching on its own. It is creating pros on its own in a way that simulates a human acting independently. That's why it's called artificial intelligence. And so that's why you have a, I believe, a very significant liability problem when AI starts generating pornography, for example. So, guys, you haven't heard a lot from me about this because I'm still really torn. I'm talking offline to some of the top AI experts and thinkers to try to wrap my head around how to think about some of this stuff.

And David, I'm finding this back and forth between our listeners. and you to be really productive to my own thinking about it. But I have to tell you, like, I don't know, I'm not there yet on either side. My jury, my brain jury is still out. Well, I'm glad that we can have this dialogue for you, Sarah. It's, it's, yeah, I'm very glad. Okay. I think it's time for circuit paloosa, or the continuation of circuit paloosa. We've got two eight circuit cases and two four circuit cases and they're all just the awesomest cases. David, let's start in the Eighth Circuit because frankly, the Eighth Circuit, you know, they just get short shrift. They're little guys up there. The Eighth Circuit, for those who do not have all of their circuits memorized, is Arkansas,

Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota. Population, relatively low, number of circuit, you know, seats, 11. It just, it's pretty, small compared to some of the other ones. But man, they got some spicy stuff going on. So these are two cases. They're both what we would refer to as like interim docket cases. This is just sort of what the, you know, preliminary injunction phase type thing will look like. Let's start with this first one, David, because I'm pretty interested in this one. Okay, Senate File 496, Iowa public school classrooms prevents a school district from providing instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation to students in kindergarten through grade six. It requires

school officials to notify parents if a student asks for the use of a pronoun that does not match the school's registration records or requests an accommodation that is attended to affirm the student's gender identity. David, the plaintiffs were some teachers, not-profit advocacy organization. They argued that it was overbroad and unconstitutionally vague, and the Eighth Circuit at this sort of preliminary stage said, no, it's not. You know what this means. And I guess, David, I'm sort of curious how to compare this to the Ninth Circuit case. Maybe we have to of a circuit split, or maybe you can distinguish these two cases, because if you remember in the Ninth Circuit case that did make it to the Supreme Court, school administrators were barred

from telling parents if their student was requesting to use different pronouns or changing their gender identity at school. And the Supreme Court said, no, that violates the parents' rights. So David, this feels like the same law the opposite way, except for saying that law is okay, but the California law wasn't? Yeah, it's interesting. Okay, let's sit down and think it through. So in the California law, you had a concrete right, both in religious liberty and substantive due process of raising your child, that this law implicated in the sense that it denied parents' information, highly relevant to core.

constitutional protected activity. So let's flip it around. Where are the concrete constitutional rights here? Does a child have a right to receive treatments and accommodations without the parents knowing? Let's put it like this. Does your child have a right to get an Advil or a Sudafed from a nurse without the parents knowing? Well, as a general matter, no. As in matter of fact, I get a phone call if one of my kids needed Advil or aspirin or whatever, I either filled out in advance the form granting discretion to the school nurse or nurse or I got a call from the school nurse saying your child is asking for this medication. Is it okay to give it? And it's because again, the concrete right here is the parent's right to direct the care and upbringing of their child,

the parents' religious liberty right. Does a child, now if there is evidence of abuse, yeah. Okay. If a child says, I am being hit by my parents, A law that said, well, then you have to immediately go call the parents and tell them that there's been an abuse report made to... No, that would not fly. That would not fly. But if it is a request for accommodations related to gender dysphoria, it seems to me that that would fall under the rubric of like having to call a parent over an aspirin or a pseudafed or any kind of treatment or accommodations, say, related to a disability. But the interesting thing about the case, Sarah, was it was really... at least this, in this preliminary stage,

it was decided on void for vagueness grounds. And one of the interesting reasons for that is because this is the overhang of Garcetti. Because if you are an educator operating within your job function, remember, Garcetti says that you don't have free speech rights. And so this is, again, a very different legal environment that the school counselors or teachers or et cetera, when they're operating on the clock on the job, they don't have free speech rights and their job-related speech.

And so you have to attack it in a different way that is much more difficult to attack, namely vagueness, for example, or overbreadth. These are really hard, hard cases to win. And similarly, on the part of the statute involving the curriculum, the state narrowed the construction of that statute, which was something that I think saved it. They basically said, we're confining its application to core curriculum. A lot of people who've read these laws say, well, what if you have a teacher who's a fifth grade teacher and he's married to a man? Can he not have a picture of his family up, et cetera, like other teachers?

And they were saying that's not what's at issue here. What's at issue here is core curriculum. And again, would you get to core curriculum? no free speech rights because of Garcetti. So you have to deal with it on like vagueness and overbred. And so on the one hand, it absolutely looks like the reverse case comes out differently because reasons. But when you look at it, who is asserting the right and what right do they have to assert is very different. So for instance, in that Ninth Circuit case, if the teachers had sued and said we have a First Amendment right to,

tell the parents if we want to. We have a First Amendment right to call a parent and tell them that their student is using different pronouns at school. That would have run into the same problems. You don't have a First Amendment right as a teacher to any specific speech. It was the parents. Related to your job, yeah. It was the parents suing, and it wasn't a First Amendment case. And so basically that all the teachers lose no matter what. And to be clear, I hate it. I do not like Garcetti at all. But anyway, it is what it is right now. And the parent thing only cuts one way. Refusing to give information to parents is going to violate their rights, but insisting

on giving information to parents, there's no potential constitutional violation of parents learn information about their children they don't care about or are great with or even if they don't want to know it. Like, we didn't violate your rights by telling you information about your child. And the child's rights are violated, in my view, only when there is a, the compelled disclosure is, say, to an abusive parent, et cetera, but the child does not have a right of privacy and their accommodations and treatments, et cetera, at school. They don't have a right of privacy vis-a-vis their own parents. Let me put it that way. They may have privacy rights and do have privacy rights regarding vis-a-vis the general public.

Absent compelling contrary reasons such as abuse, they don't have privacy. rights as minor children vis-a-vis their parents. All right, David, next eighth circuit case is actually just the, you know, next part of this same bill, but now we're in the school library. Iowa law, Senate File 496 requires the removal of books containing, quote, descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act from Iowa public school libraries and imposes penalties on educators who do not comply with the law. here we've I mean we've had this case six ways to Sunday right David because plaintiffs are unable to show likelihood of success on the merits no preliminary injunction the law both parts of this law but now we're on the library part of the law goes into effect anything surprise you in this David I mean we're basically seeing pretty consistently at this point that states can control what's in these school libraries I am

sad to say that in order to fully read and understand this case, at one point, they reference the fact that the depiction of sex acts is defined in Iowa state law in a different state law, and you can go read it here. And I was like, okay, I'll go read it. That was a mistake. Did not enjoy that. Oh, man. Oh, man. But I agree that it is very specifically defined in great anatomical detail. But, you know, David, first of all, they say some interesting stuff about how Pico doesn't exist anymore. So I know that you have Pico thoughts. And the question keeps remaining, keeps coming back up. Like, did they just ban Shakespeare? Did they ban, like, all sorts of, you know, Greek literature. Are they being prudes, basically? Yeah. So Pico is interesting because

Pico, for those who don't remember, this is a case from a rising out of 1970s culture wars just to prove to you that there is nothing new under the sun. Some parents go to a conservative conference. They learn about what they're what they believe to be anti-American books. They come back. They find these quote anti-American books in the library. They try to get them removed. There's a lawsuit. There isn't a clear majority opinion.

There's a plurality opinion that contains a Justice Brennan quote that I really love that basically. says that one of the purposes of public education is to prepare students for participation in our pluralistic, often contentious society, which I think is absolutely true. If education is it preparing you for pluralism, it's a bad education. But when you actually read the plurality, it's very frustrating because it essentially tells you, well, if you did something like ban all books by Republicans or ban all books by black authors, or ban all books by Democrats or white authors, so if you have a just a categorical ban based on viewpoint. That's not going to fly.

But at the same time, you know, look, every book, every library can't contain every book. Every library cannot be the Library of Congress. So there's going to be decisions made. And we're generally going to leave that up to school boards. So in my view, what Pico really stood for was don't do blatantly obvious sweeping large-scale viewpoint discrimination. And short of that, there's hard to find any judicial standards. And so it seems to me that this decision far from actually contradicting PICO is actually kind of consistent with it because Pico really was only clear in the plurality, to extent the plurality was clear about like big,

large scale sweeping bands based on viewpoint. All right, David, when we get back, we move to the Fourth Circuit religious exemption for vaccines. Is that constitutionally required under the First Amendment? And I don't know. I kind of got into this contracts case. I want to see if you cared about it. We'll be right back. So, David, we've talked about the Fourth Circuit being the new Ninth Circuit,

meaning it's where sort of the cutting edge liberal circuit opinions are coming out of, in large part, thanks to Judge Toby Heightens, who is brilliantly smart and very left. I mean, he's got to be on everyone's short list at this point. But this ain't that case exactly. We've got three Republican-appointed judges, and not just that, like some of the most sort of well-known conservative judges in the country. Wilkinson and Niemeyer are both Reagan appointees, and AG is a George W. Bush appointee,

and this is going to divide them. We're going to have a two-to-one decision with Wilkinson and AG versus Niemeyer. So let me tell you about this case. Anthony and Crystal Perry brought this suit on behalf of their daughter to obtain a religious exemption from West Virginia's compulsory vaccination law. Religious exemptions are not available under state law, but the Perry's claim they are required by the First Amendment. Now, interestingly, David, and I found this to be quite the twist, their daughter attends an online school. She does not go into a classroom. It's not a classroom. It's not

homeschooling because that is an exemption from the vaccine requirement if you are teaching your own child, you know, you have to check all these boxes with the state, but nevertheless, you're the teacher. They said they were not able to do that. These parents, you know, he's disabled, she works. They tried homeschooling and it did not work for their child academically. So they have chosen an online public school instead, but they're then required to vaccinate their children. daughter, even though under both the homeschool scenario and the online public school scenario, she's not around any other children, at least on a compulsory basis. But West Virginia's like, nope, we have an exception for homeschoolers, but the state of West Virginia does not have a religious

exemption at all. Two to one, David, the judges said, no problem. West Virginia does not have to have a religious exemption, and that doesn't violate anything. And if I can read you this one line, David, rights, as important as they are, do not swing free and clear of the larger social compact. We live in a society that accords its citizens enormous benefits. In return, states can, in a measured way, require certain exactions and accommodations to the broader social interest. and then goes on to talk about the police power of the state. I don't know. I was struck by so much of this, David, including just this idea of like, this is funny.

I don't know that we'd have this problem if we didn't have incorporation, right? In theory, when we did all this stuff, the state police power was not limited by the First Amendment or any of the other amendments for that matter. It's a very modern conception that the police power of the state is not complete because of the idea after the 14th Amendment that now the states are bound by the Bill of Rights. I don't know, big picture, David, was this rightly or wrongly decided? I think it was rightly decided, but I would have preferred a different formulation that would have said something along the lines of my rights end where your rights begin. And I do not have a right to be typhoid Mary. And that that is,

now, I might have a different feeling if the vaccinations were relating to non-infectious diseases. If it's a non-infectious disease, then I might have a different analysis. For infectious diseases, the idea that I would have a right to avoid a vaccine that prevents the spread of some of the most dangerous infectious diseases that exist on Earth, I'm not seeing that, Sarah. I'm not seeing that. And in fact, if you're going to go to sort of the original public meaning of our basic civil liberties, forever in our country, forever we have been able to take some pretty significant measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

And the opinion does a really good job of walking through that. And, you know, I just regret that a lot of the confusion and anger over COVID has, I think, clouded a lot of people's minds about the sort of the underlying clarity regarding vaccination against infectious diseases and how that is about other people's minds. people, not just yourself. And so, yeah, to me, this is a classic, my rights and when your rights begin kind of case. And I wish it had been sort of framed along those lines, because under original public meaning of sort of, you know, if you're going to go back and you're going to talk about sort of the long time understanding about American civil liberties in the face of pandemics and

infectious diseases, you know, if you go back to the Jacobson case, smallpox vaccine, for example, I mean, typhoid Mary is bad enough, but like smallpox Sam would be catastrophic. And so I do not believe that I possess a religious liberty right to carry an infectious disease. Okay. But isn't it meaningful to you that like there's no difference in risk between a homeschooled student and a public school student who's exclusively taught online? I mean, it almost fails rational basis at that point.

because there's no difference between those two classes of people. I think it's a public policy. I think it's a stupid distinction to exempt homeschooled kids because it's not like they don't come into contact with people. I think the thing that fails rational basis review would be the thing that's irrational, the exclusion of homeschooled kids. But does that mean that the state can mandate every citizen in its borders

get these vaccines? That's what you're saying, because you're just saying it shouldn't make a distinction about schooling or whatever else. Just every child before the age of five must be vaccinated in the state of West Virginia, and West Virginia could pass that law. Yeah. Now, in the law, they do have exceptions for when there's medical contraindications. But yeah, every person vaccinated against infectious diseases, yes.

All right. Fair enough. One more Fourth Circuit case, and I just thought this was like, it's kind of a weird one, David. We don't usually do contract, you know, dispute. and that stuff, but this is Niemeyer in dissent again. Okay, I'll read from the majority opinion. Under North Carolina law, a contract may be set aside if it was obtained through undue influence. So the question in this case will be was this contract, you know, was Stephanie Walker, an elderly widow with limited income, forced to sign this contract, undue influence,

and therefore avoiding the contract. So her Charlotte home was flooded with raw sewage from a sewer system backup. They offered her $45,000 on the condition that she signed a release of any claims she might have against the city of Charlotte related to the incident. She protested, but she was going to be homeless at that point. Her temporary housing had run out. She couldn't move back into her home. So facing the possibility of being homeless, being an elderly widow, she actually thought, and for our purposes, not at all unreasonable, will stipulate, she worried she would die if she did not take, you know, this contract being offered to her, that she could not live very long being homeless as an elderly widow in the city of Charlotte,

so she signs the contract to pay for the emergency repair so she can move back into her home. Is that undue influence, David? Oh, heck yes. I disagree. You disagree. You're with Niemeyer? I'm with Niemeyer. I mean, I tried to phrase it in the most sympathetic way to her and the majority because I'm fun like that. But, you know, that's how contracts work, right? The two parties are not in the same position. And we can't just void contracts because one party, you know, feels a lot of financial distress about the contract. I agree. But this is more than financial distress. This is physical danger. So that would be the distinction to me. But I feel bad because I've disagreed with Nehemiah in two straight opinions. And I just want to say, shout out to you, Judge Nehemiar,

because you were in the majority on one of my favorite cases of my whole career when you and the other two members of the panel held that Garcetti does not apply to college professors in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I love you for that. I'll give you grace for these two, you know, minor students. Okay, wait, I want to read from his dissent. One party's personal financial condition is not sufficient to show that the other party in any way overbore the first party's will. To the contrary, the evidence in this case is that Walker exercised her will with the advice of counsel and signed the settlement agreement

because that was the best financial outcome for her at the time, even though it was a compromise of all that she had wished to obtain. This case presents a routine negotiation for a settlement in which the party's signing were represented by counsel. The fact that the city was able, because of its superior financial condition, to adhere to its final offer, is not a ground to void the agreement that Walker voluntarily signed, albeit in protest, with the approval of her attorney. The fact remains that there was no conduct on the part of the city to overbear Walker's will. So, David, two important facts there for me and why I'm Team Niemeyer. One, she was represent. She was by counsel? That's a very compelling fact. To conduct. I think for undue influence to hit,

you have to have some baselines of what undue influence is, and I don't think it can just be a difference in the negotiating positions of the two parties. By August six months after the backup, Walker had grown desperate. She was losing her alternate housing and would need to sleep in her car. Her counsel informed Charlotte that Walker was in her late 70s and she won't last long living in a car. Walker, reverse that she was in fear for her life, that she had nowhere else to go, and that she did not have the money to fix her home and the hope of recovering her repair costs through a lawsuit. But then, like, elderly people can't sign contracts? Like, what if you signed a mortgage for a house and it was, you know, a 7% interest rate? And you're like, well, I was elderly and otherwise

I was going to have to live in my car. Charlotte poured raw sewage into her house. This isn't a This is the most sympathetic set of facts ever, and I'm mostly steal mailing. I do agree with Niemeyer, but I'm not upset by the outcome of this case, if that's, you know, like, good for you, Stephanie Walker. Way to get more money from the city of Charlotte. You're not going to do a 15-tweet tirade against this. I am not, nor do I think this has any particular effect on the law, because it can basically confined to its facts. That being said, I'm in dissent on this one. My rule is if you just

dump a giant amount of raw sewage into an elderly person's house, you can't then use their extreme personal crisis that you created to coerce a favorable financial settlement out of them. It's like the libertarian in me hates the government in this case so much. But then the like freedom of contract in me wants, you know, it's bad for society when we void contracts, basically, because it adds risk to signing any contract if you think there's a chance that it will be voided later. It makes contracts more expensive and all the sorts of stuff. So like libertarian hate government, libertarian want freedom of contract and the two come in violent, violent conflict here. And my freedom of contract and lowering contract friction is

winning out, but it's, it's hard. It's tough. I'm feeling torn. Let me put it this way. I'm very, I'm very comfortable that my rule, which is basically if you create a crisis equivalent to 10,000 people taking a dump on your floor, then there is no slippery slope here. There is no slippery slope here. This is very unique to its facts. All right, David. The Supreme Court is set to release opinions on Friday. Obviously, we do not know what those are. You know, there's a few of these cases outstanding at this point. The Calais, the Voting Rights Act, is outstanding from October. It's the only one left from October. But then again, I think that one's both really hard, going to have a lot of writing, and there's a lot of reason to just go ahead and

not release that. Like, you want to wait as long as possible, get all these primaries out of the way, basically. The slaughter case is sort of the one that's out of the way. outstanding that I think we kind of agreed as like easy in some sense. You know, we sort of looked at that and said, like, that's going to be six, three along ideological lines. The six all agree, the three all agree or disagree as you want to think about it. So I don't know, David, shot in the dark, or we're going to get some random boring ones. Hensley versus Floor Corporation is there from November about whether Boyle should be extended to allow federal interests emanating from the Federal Torts Claims Act

Combatant Activities Exemption. Blah, blah, I'm not even continuing the QP in that one. By the way, for those interested, we're not quite to Supreme Court bingo yet, but we're getting close, and let me explain how to play Supreme Court bingo. You go to SCOTUS blog,

you go to the cases pull-down menu, and then you go to statistics. And here's what you're looking for. When we get down to just a few opinions for a certain month of a sitting, it is generally the practice of the court to assign every justice an opinion.

And so if you see one missing, like for instance, in October, remember I said, the only case that has yet to be decided is Calais, the Voting Rights Act case, and then you go to majority opinions authored by sitting and look at October, there's only one justice

that has not written an opinion for October. Guess who it is? Justice Alito. So we have a very good reason to believe that Justice Alito is writing the Calais Voting Rights Act case. Now when we look at December for the slaughter case, there's still way too many cases outstanding. No real ability to tell who might write the slaughter case. But David, Friday, Opinion Day. If it's a big one, like a surprise big one, if birthright citizenship comes out on Friday,

we will do an agency pot. Short of that, though, we'll talk. to talk to you on Tuesday. And reminder for those who are curious about the slaughter case, this is the can you fire the head of an independent commission. And this is one of those areas where I've said MAGA, the Trump, the Supreme Court conservatives are pre-Trump classical liberals, almost to a person. And so therefore, you're going to see some philosophical differences between MAGA jurisprudence and sort of classical liberal originalism. However, there is a Venn diagram.

And one of those overlaps is at least to some degree in the unitary executive theory. And so when the issue is, does Trump have control over the executive branch of government, he's going to tend to win those cases. And so that's why I fully expect Slaughter to be 6-3 with the six-conservatives, unless we're at a point where like Roberts is done. He's just over it. And then it might be five, four or whatever. But yeah, we'll see.

But I'm expecting the Trump administration to win that case. You know, David, the case that I really want on Friday, if we're just doing like, you know, if wishes could be puppies. I want that land door case. This is the one where the guy has grown out his hair because of his religion. He only has a few months left of his sentence when they transfer him to a different prison. And when he arrives there, they say they're going to shave his head. And he's like, that violates my religious right.

and they're like, we're going to do it anyway. And he hands them, he physically hands them the Fifth Circuit's case saying that that would violate his rights. And they throw it in the trash and they do it anyway. And the question is, can he sue about that? I'm just, I'm dying for that one. Oh, me too. Bring it on. Bring it on.

We're ready. All right, David. Again, short of an emergency, see you Tuesday. Okay, David, that's it for us today. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch, unlocking access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com

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you next time.