It is not unusual for a federal judge to use sharp language in an opinion. It is unusual, however, when a ruling reads less like a legal document and more like a diary entry mixed with a political column.
That is precisely what Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts delivered this week in striking down part of the Trump administration’s deportation policies — complete with personal anecdotes, Shakespearean quotes, and even a back-and-forth with an anonymous critic who mailed him a postcard.
Young, who has served on the bench for over four decades, included in his ruling the image of a handwritten card dated June 19 that read: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS… WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” His response? A lengthy judicial opinion that not only struck at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for allegedly targeting pro-Palestinian noncitizens on the basis of speech, but also spiraled into a scathing meditation on Donald Trump’s presidency itself.
According to Young, Trump “simply ignores” the Constitution, embodies “triumphalism,” and carries a “fixation with retribution,” going so far as to “wreck institutions and careers simply because [he finds] them irksome.”
He invoked his wife’s observation that Trump “seems to be winning. He ignores everything and keeps bullying ahead,” which the judge described as perfectly summing up Trump’s public persona. He closed his ruling with another note to his anonymous correspondent: “Thanks for writing. It shows you care.”
For a federal ruling, it was less judicial reasoning than political sermonizing — peppered with footnotes explaining why Young now signs orders as “Bill Young” rather than “Judge Young,” in homage to a predecessor, and even an invitation for the postcard’s sender to stop by his courthouse in Boston.
The decision was not received quietly. Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, who has argued before Young, described it as “much more political than it needed to be,” warning that it blurred the line between legal reasoning and personal opinion. “It tells us more about Judge Young than it tells us about the First Amendment,” Dershowitz remarked, predicting that an appeals court would pare back its implications.
The ruling also comes amid recent friction between Young and the Supreme Court. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh had previously rebuked him for hearing cases outside his jurisdiction. Young publicly apologized, but the tension underlined the perception that the longtime judge increasingly views himself as free to editorialize from the bench.
And in a final twist, a Free Beacon review of the opinion flagged multiple errors: misspelling “anti-Semitism” as “Ant-Semitism,” mangling “United States” into “United Sates,” and odd phrasing like “with this constitution ruling.”
