Judicial Notice (02.22.26): abcdefu - by David Lat

A SCOTUS smackdown of Trump’s tariffs, more Ruemmler revelations, Alito retirement rumors, a $7.3 billion settlement, and partner departures from Kirkland and Wachtell.

President Trump and Chief Justice Roberts (photo by Win McNamee via Getty Images). Will any justices go to the State of the Union on Tuesday ? Not going would look bad, so some will probably attend—but things could get awkward.

Hello from snowy suburban New Jersey. We didn’t get as much snow during the day as we expected, but now it’s coming down—and sticking. And that’s fine: we have nowhere to go and no people to see, and both of our sons’ schools have already declared snow days for tomorrow.

Last week was busy for me—and fun. On Tuesday, I spoke about Original Jurisdiction, as well as the Substack platform more generally, at an event for Law Firm Media Professionals (LFMP). I was joined onstage by fellow Substacker Vivia Chen—with whom I collaborated on Friday, for an online dialogue about our coverage of Brad Karp. Thanks to Xenia Kobylarz for organizing and moderating the conversation and to Mayer Brown for hosting LFMP in their (beautiful) Manhattan offices.

On Thursday, I enjoyed speaking at the 2026 CPG Legal Forum, hosted by the Consumer Brands Association (CBA) at the Omni PGA Frisco Resort north of Dallas. Thanks to Joseph Aquilina for an excellent conversation and to CBA for the warm welcome (literally—it was in the 70s and sunny for pretty much my entire visit).

I appeared in some news stories, including Maureen Groppe’s USA Today piece about retirement speculation surrounding Justice Samuel Alito (discussed below) and Erin Mulvaney’s piece for The Wall Street Journal (gift link) about billable-hour rates, which was subsequently picked up by The New York Times in DealBook. I’ll take this as a sign that I should keep writing about both courts and law firms—consistent with the result of last week’s poll, in which 66 percent of you voted for me to take that path.

Now, on to the news.

Lawyers of the Week: the lawyers who challenged Trump’s tariffs before the Supreme Court.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its eagerly anticipated ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump—aka the tariffs litigation. I discuss it below, as Ruling of the Week (because of course it is). For now, I’d like to confer kudos upon the counsel who took on the Trump tariffs—and brought the litigation all the way to SCOTUS.

There were actually two cases here, which the Court consolidated for briefing and oral argument: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, litigated before Judge Rudolph Contreras (D.D.C.), and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., filed in the Court of International Trade (CIT) and then appealed to the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court granted “cert before judgment” in Learning Resources—i.e., it agreed to hear the case before the D.C. Circuit could take a whack at it—and it granted straight-up certiorari to the Federal Circuit in V.O.S. Selections. The Court then consolidated the cases for briefing and oral argument.

I prefer to be generous when it comes to congratulations, so I’d like to give shoutouts to the lawyers in both Learning Resources and V.O.S. Selections. As you can see from the petitioners’ brief in Learning Resources, they were represented by a team from Akin Gump led by Pratik Shah. As for V.O.S. Selections, the private respondents were represented by four groups: lawyers from Milbank (including Neal Katyal), Wilson Sonsini (including Michael McConnell), the Liberty Justice Center (including Jeffrey Schwab), and Professor Ilya Somin of Scalia Law. Meanwhile, the state respondents in V.O.S. were represented by Dan Rayfield and Benjamin Gutman—the attorney general and solicitor general, respectively, of Oregon.

If you want to be stingy and technical about it, you could argue that only the V.O.S.lawyers deserve congrats. Why? As noted in the first footnote of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion, “We agree with the Federal Circuit that the V.O.S. Selections case falls within the exclusive jurisdiction of the CIT”—i.e., the Court of International Trade was the correct court for challenging the tariffs. Accordingly, the Supreme Court remanded Learning Resources, “with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.” (All nine justices agreed on this jurisdictional issue: the footnote was joined by all six members of the majority, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the primary dissent joined by the remaining three justices, agreed with footnote 1—in his footnote 25.)

But here’s the funny thing. Because the Court decided both cases in a single decision—instead of issuing one ruling in V.O.S., addressing the substantive issues, and a companion decision in Learning Resources, ordering dismissal for lack of jurisdiction—the name at the top of the first page is “Learning Resources.” As is the name at the top of every page. And the name on the Court’s website. So this case will be known in the history books—and yes, it’s a history-making case—as Learning Resources.

So we owe a debt of gratitude to the lawyers who represented Learning Resources before the Court, too. Because even if they technically didn’t “win” their case, which will get dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, they gave the world a much better name for this landmark ruling than V.O.S. Selections. Pratik Shah and Akin Gump, thank you.

Other lawyers in the news:

Congratulations to the lawyers, on both sides, who worked on the monumental—and monumentally complex—$7.25 billion class-action settlement in the Roundup weedkiller litigation (discussed below as Litigation of the Week). The lawyers to the class representatives include Chris Seeger of Seeger Weiss, Joe Rice of Motley Rice, Peter Kraus of Waters Kraus, John Eddie Williams of Williams Hart, Eric Holland of the Holland Law Firm, and Michael Ketchmark of Ketchmark & McCreight. The lawyers for the defendants, Monsanto / Bayer (which acquired Monsanto in 2018), include Jeff Wintner and Elaine Golin of Wachtell Lipton and Daniel Nelson and Derek Kraft of Gibson Dunn.

The Epstein files are the gift that keeps on giving… bad publicity, to outgoing Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. When Jeffrey Epstein learned that a key co-conspirator, Jean-Luc Brunel, was thinking about meeting with prosecutors, Epstein emailed Kathy Ruemmler, laying out his concerns. We don’t know what happened next or what role (if any) she might (or might not) have played—but in the end, Brunel never talked (and Epstein remained free for another three years), as reported by The Wall Street Journal (gift link).

Remember the prostitution scandal involving Secret Service agents down in Colombia? It happened during Kathy Ruemmler’s tenure as White House counsel—and in 2014, after she left the Obama administration, journalists and lawmakers started looking into it. This made Ruemmler unhappy. So, per Bloomberg Law, she did what any of us would do in such a situation: “she complained to Epstein about ‘this secret service crap’ and forwarded to him a draft email that contained detailed, nonpublic information about the behind-the-scenes role the White House Counsel’s office played in investigating the 2012 prostitution scandal.”

In positive Epstein news—yes, there is such a thing—victims of the late financier turned sex trafficker could receive an additional $25 million to $30 million in compensation, thanks to a team from Boies Schiller led by partners David Boies, Sigrid McCawley, and Andrew Villacastin. They negotiated a proposed class-action settlement between Epstein’s former lawyer and accountant, who allegedly aided him in his sex-trafficking scheme, and the plaintiff class, Epstein victims who have not already accepted settlements and signed releases. (The settlement does require approval by Judge Arun Subramanian (S.D.N.Y.).)

Trump administration officials have been investigated for possible contempt of court—e.g., by Chief Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg (D.D.C.)—but has any official actually been held in contempt, at least until last week? If not, we’re looking at a first: on Wednesday, Judge Laura Provinzino (D. Minn.) held special assistant U.S. attorney Matthew Isiharain contempt, after the government’s alleged failure to comply with her order. Judge Provinzino had ordered a detained migrant to be released in Minnesota, with all of his property returned; instead, he was released in Texas, without his property. (It appears that he’s now back home in Minnesota, and his property has been, or is in the process of being, returned.)

In other federal prosecutorial news, the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia on Friday appointed James Hundley, an experienced defense lawyer, as U.S. attorney—but a few hours later, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanchefired him.

If you’re a U.S. attorney who’s unable or unwilling to follow the directives of Donald Trump, who is your “chief client,” then you should resign—in the view of Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, “the Trump Justice Department’s brashest enforcer when it comes to clamping down on U.S. attorneys’ autonomy” (according to this profile of him in Bloomberg Law).

Speaking of profiles, here’s a fun one of legendary entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman, by Holly Peterson for The Wall Street Journal (gift link).

In memoriam: Norman Francis—the first Black student to integrate the law school at Loyola University, before going on to an illustrious career in civil-rights work and later education, culminating in his service as president of Xavier University for 47 years—passed away, at 94. May he rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Justice Samuel Alito.

It’s kinda funny that the most talked-about individual member of the Supreme Court was one of the two who didn’t write a separate opinion in the tariffs litigation: Justice Samuel Alito (Justice Sonia Sotomayor, his fellow Princeton and Yale Law alum, was the other). But Justice Alito was in the news for at least two other reasons.

First, the Supreme Court announced that it will now be using “newly developed software that will assist in identifying potential conflicts for the Justices,” with an eye to helping them recuse themselves when necessary. Some commentators, such as Joe Patrice of Above the Law, wondered why it took so long. That’s a fair question; but speaking for myself, I’m just glad that they’re taking this step.

What does this have to do with Justice Alito? As noted by Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, “only two justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, own individual stocks, with the former holding shares in two companies and the latter holding shares in more than two dozen.” Justice Alito’s extensive stock holdings have required him to recuse on multiple occasions over the years, per Jimmy Hoover of Law.com—which even the justices themselves acknowledge as suboptimal, since “[t]he loss of even one Justice may undermine the ‘fruitful interchange of minds which is indispensable’ to the Court’s decision-making process.”

I agree with Gabe Roth, Professors Will Baude and Dan Epps of Divided Argument, Chris Geidner of Law Dork, and the many other observers who support a very modest ethics reform: prohibiting justices from owning individual stocks. This wouldn’t prevent them from reaping the benefits of investing or saving for retirement, since they could still own any other investments—such as low-cost index funds, which many investment experts recommend over individual stock ownership anyway.

I appreciate the ability to own individual stocks as much as the next guy or gal (especially as someone who bought Apple in 2004 and Amazon in 2010)—but I’m just a random citizen, not a justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Gabe Roth put it, “Public service requires certain sacrifices in the name of ethics, and going stock-free should be one of them for all branches of government.”

If Justice Alito really wants to own individual stocks—and if his wife really wants to fly her flags—he could step down from the Supreme Court in 2026, his twentieth anniversary as a justice. This brings us to the second reason he was in the news: he was the subject of retirement speculation, “particularly among liberal commentators,” as reported by Maureen Groppe of USA Today. I hold a different view—but I’ll stop here, since I plan to tackle this topic in a forthcoming post.

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

Speaking of the justices, I’m a big fan of Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett—and so is Professor Cass Sunstein, who praised them in a Substack post titled “The Lawyerly Virtues” (via Howard Bashman’s How Appealing).

Speaking of fanboys, might Judge Thomas Ludington (E.D. Mich.) be a fan of Gayle, the songstress behind the hit single “abcdefu”? When pulled over after crashing his Cadillac and asked to perform a field sobriety test, he allegedly responded as follows when asked to recite the alphabet: “A, B, C, D, F, U.” A post-crash test showed he had a blood-alcohol content of 0.27—far above the legal limit of 0.08—but His Honor has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor DWI charges, with a jury trial scheduled for May 8 in Michigan state court.

Speaking of judges accused of misconduct, we now know more about the accusations against former judge Mark Wolf (D. Mass.)—who stepped down before the investigation could conclude. He allegedly “yelled at his staff, made demeaning comments, and threw papers in frustration in chambers,” according to former law clerks and other staff who spoke to Bloomberg Law.

In nominations news:

On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced four new judicial nominees. For the Eighth Circuit, he nominated Justin Smith (8th Cir.), who represented Trump in Trump v. United States aka the SCOTUS immunity case (and who also served as deputy counsel to the governor and deputy attorney general in Missouri, but I’m guessing the Trump work played a bigger role in his selection). For the District of Kansas, Trump picked Kansas Solicitor General Anthony Powell, Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Tony Mattivi, and civil litigator Jeffrey Kuhlman.

On Friday, we learned that two leading lights of the federal judiciary, Chief Judges Jeffrey Sutton (6th Cir.) and Debra Ann Livingston (2d Cir.), will take senior status—effective October 1 and July 1, respectively. Judges often announce such plans well in advance, so their successor can be in place by the time they’re ready to step down. But from Trump’s perspective, getting these announcements now is helpful because he can fill the seats before the midterm elections—and while the Republicans still hold 53 seats in the Senate. If you’re interested in reliable intel on possible nominees, follow Mike Fragoso, who worked on nominations for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.)—and who has already floated names for these Sixth Circuit and Second Circuit seats.

Job of the Week: an opportunity for a midlevel M&A associate in Atlanta.

Lateral Link is partnering with an Am Law 25 firm seeking a midlevel M&A associate with three to five years of experience (sixth-year max) to join its Chambers-ranked corporate practice in Atlanta. This team handles sophisticated public and private M&A transactions, with strategic deals averaging approximately $500 million, along with broader corporate and governance matters. The ideal candidate will have excellent academic credentials and meaningful experience at a large law firm advising on complex M&A deals, with exposure to cross-border transactions as a plus. If you’re interested in handling top-tier deal work outside New York, without sacrificing platform or prestige, please send your resume and law school transcript to Marion Wilson at [email protected].

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