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I have no legal background but found it very odd to find a statement like this in Brann's decision, especially in view of the gravity of the matter before him and the fact that it pertains to the president of the United States:
"This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent."
I've done a lot of writing in my career but would never have written anything like that. It seems dismissive, sarcastic and unprofessional to me.
Well, that’s Matt Brann, and its the kind of stuff he wrote in the school paper years ago. He is a judge as a payback for his work for the state old GOP bosses. Trump has taken the party in a new direction, and the old guard wants their power back. The fact is that too many of our judges are just political hacks.
Our law schools need an overhaul in many ways. They are controlled by the ABA, which has a near total monopoly in regulating law schools and degrees in the U.S. Long gone are the days when a person could become a lawyer by apprenticing under a practicing lawyer for a term of years. You wouldn’t want a guy with B.S. in engineering being recognized as professor because he got A’s and won a competition to make the biggest structure with dry spaghetti and marshmellows. Yet, our law schools are taught by people with only a first law degree, and maybe wrote law review comments or were on moot court teams. In other places, law professors actually need to write a peer reviewed dissertation. Then such people get named judges, but not in the U.S.
Furthermore, having read the cited precedent, I wouldn’t agree that it was necessarily controling. Since it was pending further appellate review in the Third Circuit, he could have certified the question to the Third Circuit for interlocutory review possibly. Trump’s team just requested review on the issue of his refusal to read the second amended complaint.