Justice Stephen G. Breyer on Saturday defended a judge accused of defying a Supreme Court ruling, saying in an interview that he knew the judge to be scrupulously honest and respectful of higher courts.
Justice Breyer, who retired from the court in 2022, has avoided criticism of his former colleagues. He declined on Saturday to directly address Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s concurring opinion last month accusing Judge William G. Young, of the Federal District Court in Boston, of ignoring a binding precedent.
But that opinion plainly prompted Justice Breyer’s decision to step forward with rare public comments in praise of Judge Young as model jurist whose rulings he had often reviewed during his 14 years as an appeals court judge in Boston.
“I never saw an instance where he would deliberately defy a controlling opinion or legal statement from our court or from the Supreme Court,” Justice Breyer said. “I never even had an instinct or a guess or a hunch or anything that he was doing anything like that deliberately.”
Justice Breyer’s comments were the latest indication of growing tensions within the judiciary, as courts grapple with the flood of lawsuits prompted by the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to remake the government, and as trial judges struggle to interpret the Supreme Court’s emergency orders.
Justice Gorsuch had harsh words for Judge Young, accusing him of serious misconduct in a ruling restoring grants from the National Institutes of Health that the Trump administration had sought to cancel.
“Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, adding that Judge Young had ignored the reasoning in an unsigned four-paragraph interim order in a different case in April.
Justice Gorsuch acknowledged that such orders are not final determinations, but said that “even probabilistic holdings” like the one in April must command respect. “Whatever their own views, judges are duty bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,’” he added, citing an earlier opinion.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the concurring opinion.
The criticism prompted an unusual apology from Judge Young at a hearing last week.
“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.
He added that “I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer.”
Judge Young was not alone in trying to make sense of the Supreme Court’s cryptic orders on what critics call its shadow docket. Ruling for Harvard last week in its suit against the Trump administration, Judge Allison D. Burroughs, another federal judge in Boston, wrote that “the Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket rulings regarding grant terminations have not been models of clarity, and have left many issues unresolved.”
Responding to Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence, she wrote that “it is unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for ‘defying’ the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”
At last week’s hearing, Judge Young, 84, seemed to be reeling from a blow to his reputation administered by a Supreme Court justice.
“I have served in judicial office now for over 47 years,” he said. “Never before this admonition has any judge in any higher court ever thought to suggest that this court had defied the precedent of a higher court.”
Justice Breyer said the judge he knew would never have done such a thing.
“He was honest,” the justice said of his former colleague. “He was a straightforward judge, a very decent person and a good judge.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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