Noah Feldman, Columnist

Why It Took 277 Pages to Cut One Question From the Census

The judge in the citizenship case knows all the legal angles and built a ruling to withstand any attack.

January 16, 2019 at 9:24 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."

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There’s no such thing as a perfectly bulletproof judicial opinion. But the 277-page decision blocking the Trump administration from asking about citizenship on the 2020 census comes close.

The opinion, issued Tuesday by Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is a masterpiece of factual and legal analysis, both detailed and duplicative, that is designed to withstand an expedited appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and potential blocking or review by the Supreme Court. Its bottom line is clear: Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross broke the legal rules when he ordered the citizenship question to be added to the census. Whatever his real motive was, it wasn’t to find out how many noncitizens live in the U.S.