Guess Which Legal Event Feels Like Tindering Behind The Wife’s Back?

This is “Maybe I was cheating, but why were you looking through my phone?” level DARVO-ing.
The post Guess Which Legal Event Feels Like Tindering Behind The Wife’s Back? appeared first on Above the Law.

The Alito leak, according to Justice Clarence Thomas.

At a conference held by the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Hoover Institution, Thomas shared his thoughts on the leak and the current state of the rule of law.

[A] loss of trust changes an institution fundamentally and you “begin to look over your shoulder.” Trust “is gone forever” and it’s “like kind of an infidelity.”

I think that Thomas’s words are both apt and cute. My mind jumps to recently appointed Supreme Court justices who promised to be impartial and stating that Roe was decided law overturning about 50 years of precedent as soon as they were able to as a kind of infidelity that erases trust forever — I mean, will anyone take these confirmation hearings seriously after Dobbs?

Tom Tom also had this to say about how the leak, not the opinion itself, is the harbinger of decline:

…And the institution that I’m a part of, if someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone, and you would say that, ‘Oh, that’s impossible. No one would ever do that.’ There was such a belief in the rule of law, belief in the court, a belief in what we were doing, that that was verboten. It was beyond anyone’s understanding, or at least anyone’s imagination, that someone would do that. And look where we are, where now that trust or that belief is gone forever. When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder.

This powerful quote which singles out the leak as the turning point expanding the Overton window will echo throughout the halls of jurisprudence forever if it is discovered that a liberal clerk was behind the leak. And if time shows that it was actually leaked by someone on the right who wanted to pressure the conservative justices into joining the opinion, we’ll get some block quote about turning the other cheek and how offering grace is a longstanding tradition in our nation.

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.