Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Battle for the 9th Circuit Court Falls Silent

How the death of a liberal lion and the retirement of a conservative stalwart will change the U.S. judiciary.

April 2, 2018 at 5:32 PM UTC

Corrected

April 3, 2018 at 2:11 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Site of some epic battles.
Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

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The death of Judge Stephen Reinhardt last week at age 87 marks the end of an era for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which also saw the abrupt retirement of Judge Alex Kozinski in December. For more than three decades, the largest appeals court in the nation had been the site of an epic legal struggle between the progressive liberal lion and the conservative-libertarian stalwart.

The two judges, each brilliant in his own way and each at the extreme end of the ideological spectrum, fought with all the judicial tools available -- and even invented some new ones along the way. Their rivalry defined the 9th Circuit, at least from the perspective of the appellate lawyers who actually care about what appeals courts do. It won’t be the same again.