Remember DOGE, the Elon Musk-led “government efficiency” project that spread chaos during President Donald Trump’s first few months back in office, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and then vanished almost as abruptly as it began?

If you didn’t lose your job in one of Musk’s federal employee purges, or you aren’t one of the remaining federal civil servants who has to figure out how to do your job without many of your colleagues around, DOGE is probably little more than a memory. But the legacy of this era of arbitrary firings is still being litigated in federal court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett just handed down some very bad news for nearly every civilian who works for the federal government.

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s decision in Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, which was handed down on Tuesday, is a bit removed from Elon’s brief stint as Trump’s human resources manager. The case concerns whether federal immigration judges have a First Amendment right to give public speeches about immigration law. And the full Supreme Court decided to get rid of the case using a procedural argument that has few implications for federal employees.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, in an opinion joined by Barrett, wrote a separate opinion that would allow Trump to strip all federal civil servants of employment protections that many federal workers have enjoyed since the Chester A. Arthur administration.

While Thomas often takes extreme positions, Barrett is a relative moderate who is close to the center of the GOP-controlled Supreme Court. So, if Barrett is willing to endorse Thomas’s one neat trick to abolish civil service protections, that’s a strong sign that a majority of the Court agrees with her position.

Republican judges have long backed a legal theory known as the “unitary executive,” which holds that the president must have the power to fire high-ranking government officials who lead federal agencies. But the unitary executive has not historically been understood to eliminate employment protections for civil servants and other relatively low-ranking federal employees. 

Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), which is considered something akin to a holy text to proponents of the unitary executive, referred to the president’s power to “remove executive officers” — “officers” are relatively high-ranking government workers — but it did not say that the president must be able to fire every individual postal worker or Social Security clerk.

In Margolin, however, Thomas and Barrett suggest a way to collapse this distinction between agency leaders and ordinary civil servants. Trump can simply fire all of the government officials who adjudicate civil service disputes, and then civil servants will no longer have any enforceable rights.

Barrett, in other words, appears to believe that civil service protections only exist if the president wants them to exist. And if she says so, it’s likely the Court’s majority will, too.

Why civil service protections are essential to a modern government

If you watched the Netflix show Death by Lightning, which was about the brief presidency of James A. Garfield, or if you read the book the show was based on, you got a pretty good picture of what the president’s life was like before civil service reform.

As author Candice Millard wrote, when Garfield took office, the line of job seekers hoping to secure a federal job “began to form before he even sat down to breakfast.” By the time Garfield had finished his meal, “it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue.” As president, Garfield was expected to meet with each of these job-seekers and sort them into jobs — often based on whether they had a politically powerful patron.

This system was inefficient, as it forced the federal government to replace much of its workforce every time the White House changed hands. It diverted a simply enormous amount of the president’s attention into low-level hiring decisions. It fostered corruption, as often the only way to secure a federal job was to do favors for a senator, congressman, or some other powerful figure who could act as the job-seeker’s patron. And it made it very difficult for the government to hire highly specialized workers.

Why would someone go to the trouble of, say, getting an economics degree and becoming an expert on federal monetary policy if they knew that their job in the Treasury Department would evaporate the minute their party lost an election?

President Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, shortly after Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job-seeker. It was the first of several laws which ensure that the government did not have to replace every Republican postal worker or FBI agent with a Democrat if a Republican president lost an election. 

Modern civil service laws also prohibit the federal government’s political leadership from coercing civil servants into political activity. They provide protections for whistleblowers. And they generally ensure that the government will be staffed by competent professionals who provide continuity across presidential administrations.

Federal civil service laws are primarily enforced by an agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Civil servants who believe their rights as federal employees have been violated typically must file their case in the MSPB, which gets the first crack at adjudicating these sorts of disputes.

Early in his second presidency, however, Trump took several actions that appeared designed to shut down the MSPB. He fired one of the Board’s members, depriving the MSPB of the quorum it needs to operate. He also fired Special Counsel of the United States Hampton Dellinger, an official who investigates alleged violations of civil service laws and brings cases to the MSPB, and attempted to replace Dellinger with a far-right podcaster.

Since then, Trump has taken some actions to reinvigorate the MSPB. The Board now has two members, which is the minimum it needs to operate. The podcaster withdrew from consideration to replace Dellinger after Politico reported that the podcaster said he has a “Nazi streak in me from time to time.” And Trump later assigned Dellinger’s duties to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

So, while there are good reasons to believe that the MSPB is significantly diminished thanks to Trump’s actions, the Board currently has the minimum amount of personnel it needs to operate. But that was not true for the first several months of the second Trump administration, when it only had one member and thus was unable to adjudicate civil service disputes.

Barrett would let Trump abolish civil service protections by firing the MSPB’s members

The most interesting issue in the Margolin case concerns what should have happened if Trump had never appointed a second MSPB member, and thus had left the Board inoperative.

A federal appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, decided Margolin in June 2025, during the period when the MSPB was defunct. That court suggested that, if the MSPB is nonfunctional, then the federal judiciary must step in and hear civil service disputes that otherwise would be heard by the MSPB — because, otherwise, federal civil service laws would cease to function. 

On Tuesday, the full Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit, although it did so on narrow grounds. The full Court’s opinion in Margolin states simply that the Fourth Circuit should not have opined on what happens when the MSPB is defunct, because the plaintiffs in Margolin did not raise this issue in their briefs. 

But Thomas’s concurring opinion, which was joined by Barrett, rejects the Fourth Circuit’s argument outright. He argues that federal law says that civil servants must bring employment disputes in the MSPB, and if there is no MSPB, that means that they are simply out of luck.

Thus, as a practical matter, Trump could gain the power to fire any federal worker simply by firing one of the two current members of the MSPB. If that happened, the MSPB would cease to function, and federal civil servants would be cut off from any legal remedies, even if they were illegally fired for being Democrats.

Despite the significant implications of Barrett’s decision to join Thomas’s opinion, it isn’t particularly surprising. Last July, in McMahon v. New York (2025), the Court permitted the Trump administration to fire about half of the Department of Education’s workforce. Though the Court’s three Democrats dissented in McMahon, the Republican justices in the majority did not explain their decision; it was decided on the Court’s shadow docket, and the justices often do not explain their reasoning in those cases.

Nevertheless, McMahon was an early sign that the Court’s Republican majority does not support civil service protections, or believe that those laws should be enforced. Barrett’s decision to join Thomas’s Margolin opinion also suggests that she holds that view.

It appears, in other words, that this Supreme Court wants to tear down a consensus that was reached in 1883 — that the federal government should have a professional civil service that cannot be removed simply because the Republican Party controls the White House. Barrett’s move suggests Trump has plenty of leeway to keep firing people, even if federal law is supposed to stop him from doing so.

KUALA LUMPUR, June 4 — A husband and wife pleaded not guilty in the Sessions Court here today to a charge of abusing a three-year-old girl, causing her physical injuries, last month.

Nightclub bouncer Hamzi Amni Zamali, 40, and housewife Nurazwani Ahmad Rosli, 29, were jointly charged, as persons responsible for the child's care, with abusing the girl and causing physical injuries at a low-cost flat unit in Bandar Tasik Selatan here on May 23, 2026.

The charge was framed under Section 31(1)(a) of the Child Act 2001, read together with Section 34 of the Penal Code, which carries a maximum fine of RM50,000, imprisonment of up to 20 years, or both, upon conviction.

Deputy public prosecutor Ravindejit Kaur objected to bail, citing the seriousness of the offence involving a child who is Nurazwani's biological daughter.

However, should the court allow bail, she proposed bail of RM30,000 for each accused, with an additional condition requiring them to report to the nearest police station twice a month.

“For the court’s information, the first accused (Hamzi Amni) has several previous criminal records, including rape, robbery and armed robbery. Therefore, the prosecution requests that the victim in this case not live with the two accused,” she said.

Hamzi Amni and Nurazwani, who were unrepresented, appealed for a lower bail amount, saying they had family members in their hometown to support.

Judge Siti Shakirah Mohtarudin granted bail of RM20,000 each with one surety and imposed additional conditions requiring them to report to the nearest police station twice a month and prohibiting them from approaching the victim until the case is concluded.

The court set July 13 for mention of the case, submission of documents and appointment of counsel. — Bernama

PUTRAJAYA, June 3 — Lawyer Syed Iskandar Syed Jaafar Al Mahdzar has filed an application at the Federal Court seeking leave to appeal in relation to his judicial review challenge concerning the former Yang di-Pertuan Agong’s refusal to a request by the then prime minister to declare a state of emergency five years ago.

When contacted by Bernama, Syed Iskandar confirmed that the notice of motion was filed last Friday through law firm Messrs R.Kengadharan & Co.

On May 4 this year, the Court of Appeal three-man bench comprising Federal Court judge Datuk Collin Lawrence Sequerah and Court of Appeal judges Datuk Supang Lian and Datuk Dr Alwi Abdul Wahab, dismissed Syed Iskandar’s appeal.

Syed Iskandar had filed an originating summons in 2020, seeking a declaration that the Constitution (Amendment) Act 1981 (Act A514), which added Clauses 8 (a) and (b) to Article 150, is unconstitutional, null and void and of no effect on the ground that it violated the basic structure of the Federal Constitution.

He named the Malaysian Government and 10 others as defendants in the suit.

On February 15, 2024, the High Court in Kuala Lumpur dismissed the originating summons. The court ruled that Article 150(8) does not violate the basic structure of the Federal Constitution and cannot be struck down under Article 40(1), which states that the Yang di-Pertuan Agong shall act on the advice of the Cabinet.

In dismissing Syed Iskandar’s appeal, Justice Sequerah ruled that matters concerning emergency powers under Article 150 of the Federal Constitution are non-justiciable.

“A court would not be equipped to decide on the legality of the Yang Di-Pertuan Agong’s satisfaction of national threats as it would be impossible to adduce all available facts before the courts, and as such it would be inappropriate for a court exercising powers of judicial review to make value judgments of non-judicial nature,” he said in his grounds of decision.

He further said that there was a need to include Clause 8 to exclude the court from reviewing the proclamation of emergency and any related ordinance, as certain sensitive information is only available to the Executive, and it was not wise for such sensitive information to be disclosed to the public and be subjected to judicial review.

Justice Sequerah added that the courts were also ill-equipped to deal with matters involving national security. — Bernama

Two Hong Kong men accused of conspiring to incite people to riot during the 2019 protests and unrest have had their case moved to a higher court, where they face a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.

Ng Tsz-lok, who is unemployed, and photographer Chan Wai-leong appeared at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Thursday.

The two men have been remanded since they were charged in October over their alleged role in the anti-extradition protests six years ago. Prosecutors have accused them of manufacturing and providing weapons to protesters.

The pair have been charged with conspiring to incite others to take part in a riot, with the date of the offence being October 22 to 23, 2019.

Ng was among a group of defendants acquitted by a High Court jury in September of alleged involvement in three bomb plots in places including a hospital and a car park between November 2019 and March 2020.

With the completion of handover procedures, Magistrate Victor So announced on Thursday the transfer of the case to the District Court.

The maximum penalty at the District Court is seven years’ imprisonment. At the magistrates’ court, the maximum penalty is two years, or three years when a defendant is convicted of more than one offence.

The case will be heard at the District Court on June 2 for the pair to confirm whether they will plead guilty or not guilty, So said.

Ng also faced an additional charge of “incitement to take part in a riot” on November 14, 2019. The prosecution said on Thursday it had changed the charge to “conspiracy to incite others to take part in a riot” and added an additional day – November 15, 2019 – to the offence.

The details of the amended charge specified that the target of Ng’s incitement was an unknown individual and somebody by the name of Lee Tsz-ying – transliterated from Cantonese, as read out in court by the prosecution.

The prosecution also added a new charge for Ng, accusing him of inciting others to riot on different dates, between October 19 and November 8, 2019.

Protests erupted in June 2019 over a since-axed extradition bill. They escalated into sometimes violent displays of dissent against police behaviour, amid calls for democracy and anger over Beijing’s encroachment. Demonstrators demanded an independent probe into police conduct, amnesty for those arrested and a halt to the characterisation of protests as “riots.”

The movement died down in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic and a national security law imposed by Beijing authorities in June that year.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice released an opinion on Tuesday that, in the likely event it is embraced by a Republican-controlled federal judiciary, would make it significantly harder for plaintiffs who face employment discrimination to prevail in court.

The opinion was released by the Office of Legal Counsel, an institution that interprets federal law and the Constitution for executive branch officials, and is signed by T. Elliot Gaiser, the head of that office. Gaiser is a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which repealed a 1982 amendment to the federal Voting Rights Act and greenlit a new round of gerrymandering by white Southern Republican lawmakers.

Gaiser’s opinion argues that Alito’s attack on the Voting Rights Act in Callais applies with equal force to anti-discrimination law in employment. And, if you accept Alito’s opinion in Callais as legitimate, then Gaiser’s approach to employment discrimination is hardly a stretch. Indeed, it is the next logical move in the Republican Party’s broader campaign to weaken civil rights protections for racial minorities. 

Notably, one day after Gaiser released his opinion, Trump’s Department of Transportation announced that it was applying Callais to its regulations. So it appears that this administration wants to implement Alito’s views throughout the executive branch.

The 1982 law that Alito targeted in Callais provided that voting rights plaintiffs who challenged a state election law did not need to prove that state lawmakers acted with racist intent in order to prevail. Under that law, which was repealed by Callais, a state law that “results” in voters having their right to vote diminished due to their race may also be challenged.

For 40 years, the Supreme Court interpreted this “results” test to sometimes require states to draw a minimum number of legislative districts where Black or Latino voters can elect their candidates of choice. After Callais, white lawmakers are now free to draw maps that will only elect white Republicans, so long as they claim that the purpose of those maps is to lock Democrats out of power and not to target voters of color.

Gaiser’s opinion, meanwhile, concerns a 1991 federal law that sometimes permits an employment discrimination plaintiff to prevail if they can show that an employer engages in a “practice that causes a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” This framework, which is known as “disparate impact,” is similar to the one laid out in the pre-Callais Voting Rights Act, because it sometimes permits a civil rights plaintiff to prevail without proving that the employer acted with racist or otherwise impermissible intent.

Given these similarities, Gaiser’s core argument — that Callais’s framework also applies to disparate impact suits — is likely to prevail before a Republican Supreme Court. Quoting from Callais, Gaiser argues that federal employment discrimination law “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” 

There are two upshots to this conclusion. One is that it should be significantly harder for many employment discrimination plaintiffs to prevail. The other, which is potentially even more significant, is that elected officials should lose much of their power to remedy discrimination of all kinds, and the scope of civil rights law should be determined primarily by the Supreme Court.

Both the Voting Rights Act’s results test and employment discrimination’s disparate impact test, after all, were enacted into law by Congress. But the Republican Party’s consistent position on civil rights laws is that democratically enacted civil rights laws must bow to the whims of Republican justices.

Disparate impact, explained

In fairness, disparate impact lawsuits predate Congress’s decision to endorse them in 1991. The Supreme Court first embraced the idea that employment practices that have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities may be illegal in its unanimous decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971).

Griggs involved an employer who had historically employed both Black and white workers who did not have a high school diploma, but it restricted all Black workers to the lowest-paying jobs. Shortly after Congress banned employment discrimination in 1964, this employer instituted a new policy preventing people without a high school diploma from transferring out of the lowest paying jobs, but it grandfathered in white employees without a high school education who were already in higher paying roles.

The Court ruled against the employer. While the justices acknowledged that there are often valid reasons for an employer to require its employees to have a certain level of education, the fact that white workers without a high school diploma had historically performed well in some of this particular employer’s higher-paying roles suggested that Black workers without a high school education would also perform well in those roles. 

Griggs established that, when an education requirement or similar barrier has a disproportionate negative impact on workers of a particular race, the requirement must actually be “a reasonable measure of job performance.” 

Congress later codified this rule in the 1991 law, which forbids employment practices that have a disparate impact on certain groups of workers, unless the employer can show “that the challenged practice is job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” 

Republican judges, however, have long been skeptical of these disparate impact suits. In Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), for example, five of the Court’s Republicans rejected a lawsuit challenging an exam that the city of New Haven, Connecticut, used to screen firefighters seeking a promotion, even though nearly all of the applicants who passed the test were white. In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that the 1991 law endorsing these suits may be unconstitutional.

But that law, and a similar law that permits disparate impact suits in housing discrimination cases, are still technically good law today. During the Obama administration, the DOJ used disparate impact lawsuits against lenders accused of widespread housing discrimination. The mortgage lender Countrywide, for example, agreed to pay $335 million to settle a claim that it “charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk.”

Disparate impact suits may also be key to preventing employers from using biased algorithms in hiring.

Suppose, for example, that an employer uses artificial intelligence to screen job applicants. The AI has a hidden bias that disproportionately screens out Black candidates, but the employer itself has no discriminatory intent. Can the employer be sued under a disparate impact theory? A California federal court is currently wrestling with this issue in a case called Mobley v. Workday.

Notably, the judge hearing the Mobley case rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that employers who use this AI engaged in intentional discrimination, but allowed the case to move forward on a disparate impact theory.

The Republican Party’s approach to civil rights law is fundamentally anti-democratic

The question of what protections racial minorities should enjoy in housing, employment, election law, and elsewhere is fraught. The United States is a much less racist place than it was in 1971, when Griggs was decided and the American South was still clawing its way out of Jim Crow, but the nation is far from a bastion of racial equality.

In 2024, according to US census data, the median white household earned $88,010 in annual income, while the median Black household earned just $56,020.

Ordinarily, when the United States faces a difficult policy question like what, if anything, should be done to close racial gaps, it leaves that question to elected officials. Congress decided, when it enacted the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, to prevent many states from locking Black and Latino voters out of power in Congress. And it decided, when it enacted the 1991 law codifying disparate impact lawsuits, to permit those lawsuits to move forward.

The fundamental premise of both the Callais decision and Gaiser’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion, however, is that these difficult policy questions should be removed from the democratic process and given to a Republican judiciary. And the Republican justices believe that America has largely solved its racism problem, and so laws like the amended Voting Rights Act or the ones enabling disparate impact suits are no longer necessary.

Setting aside whether that is the correct position, it is far from clear why six Republican lawyers in black robes have more insight into US civil rights policy than the people American voters elected to make these decisions.

About a year ago, the Supreme Court handed down a baffling decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025). In Medina, South Carolina committed an obvious violation of federal Medicaid law, but the Court’s Republican majority seemed to bend over backward to prevent the patients affected by this legal violation from suing to enforce their rights. Among other things, the Court’s opinion in Medina was at odds with a decision the justices handed down just two years earlier in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023).

As I wrote at the time, the best explanation for Medina was not legal; it was political. South Carolina broke federal law specifically because it illegally cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. The Republican justices appear to have bent the rules to ensure that an abortion provider would be defunded.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a new opinion in FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital Master Fund, which only adds to the mystery about why Medina came down the way it did. The facts of FS Credit are quite different from the issues in Medina — FS Credit is a securities law case asking when investors may sue investment funds, while Medina concerned when patients may sue states for violating Medicaid law. But the legal issues in FS Credit and Medina are very similar. They both involve a legal doctrine known as “implied causes of action.”

Although Medina is the Court’s most recent case (prior to FS Credit) that deals with implied causes of action, the FS Credit decision does not cite Medina anywhere. Instead, it quotes heavily from decisions that the Court refused to follow in Medina. And it explicitly embraces a legal rule that the Court seemed to reject in Medina.

The rules governing implied causes of action are complicated enough to reduce even experienced lawyers to tears. But, if you bear with me, it will be difficult to avoid a simple conclusion: The Court appears to be manipulating these rules to achieve outcomes preferred by the Republican justices and the anti-abortion movement.

What is an implied cause of action?

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion in FS Credit begins with a simple declarative sentence: “Congress, not the Judiciary, decides who may enforce the law.” Not all federal laws may be enforced through lawsuits, and not all people who may want to sue under a particular federal law are allowed to do so. 

In some cases, a federal law explicitly states that it authorizes private lawsuits against violators of that law, or it states who is allowed to bring those suits. In other cases, a right to sue may be implied from statutory text that does not explicitly provide for such suits. These implicit rights to sue are known as “implied causes of action.”

Before Medina, the question of whether a particular federal law creates an implied cause of action was governed by the Court’s decision in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002), which held that “for a statute to create private rights [to sue], its text must be phrased in terms of the persons benefited.”

Thus, for example, a hypothetical statute stating that “no sweaty person may be denied access to a shower” may be enforced through private lawsuits, because that law is phrased in terms of who benefits from it (sweaty people). A similar statute which provides that “states may not impede access to showers” would not be enforceable through private lawsuits, because that statute lacks the person-focused language demanded by Gonzaga.

Prior to the Medina decision in 2025, the Court repeatedly reaffirmed Gonzaga’s rule. It did so most recently in Talevski, which held that a federal law creates an implied cause of action when it is “‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited’ and contains ‘rights-creating,’ individual-centric language with an ‘unmistakable focus on the benefited class.’”

Under the Gonzaga framework, Medina should have been an open-and-shut case. The case involved a federal law that permits Medicaid patients to choose their health providers. South Carolina violated this law by refusing to allow Medicaid patients to choose Planned Parenthood as their health provider. Here is the relevant statutory text:

A State plan for medical assistance must … provide that … any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required (including an organization which provides such services, or arranges for their availability, on a prepayment basis), who undertakes to provide him such services.

This law contains the very kind of “individual-centric language” demanded by cases like Gonzaga and Talevski. It extends a right to “any individual,” providing that these individuals “may obtain” medical care from their chosen provider. It also concludes with a pronoun (“him”) that refers back to the individuals who benefit from the law.

And yet, in Medina, the six Republican justices rendered this statute unenforceable. And they did so in an opinion that didn’t even quote the relevant legal rule. The words “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” appear nowhere in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion.

Gorsuch’s Medina opinion is very difficult to parse, but it appears to create a new rule establishing that no statute may create an implied cause of action unless that statute includes the magic word “right” — as in: an individual’s rights. 

FS Credit relies on the same Gonzaga rule that the Court seemed to abandon in Medina

Barrett’s majority opinion in FS Credit, however, offers no hint that Medina even happened. Barrett does not at any point suggest that a statute must use any specific magic words in order to authorize private lawsuits. Instead, it relies on the pre-Medina framework established by cases like Gonzaga.

FS Credit holds that “to create a private right, a statute must use ‘rights-creating language’ aimed at protecting ‘a particular class of persons.’” It then quotes the key line from Gonzaga, which states that “statutes create private rights when they are ‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited.’” So Gonzaga is back, baby.

But, if the Court wanted to dispel the impression that Medina was a one-off decision that simply came up with an excuse to deny relief to abortion providers and their patients, Barrett’s FS Credit opinion needed to explain why the new rule that the Court seemed to apply in Medina does not apply in FS Credit. Instead, Barrett’s opinion does not include a single citation to Medina.

One possibility is that the two cases are different because Medina involved Medicaid, which is a federal spending program, while FS Credit involves a statute regulating private businesses. Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina says that “spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely” to contain implied causes of action. So maybe the magic word rule that Gorsuch appeared to rely on in Medina only applies to Medicaid and other cases involving government spending programs.

But Talevski, the Supreme Court case decided two years before Medina, didn’t just reject the argument that there are different rules for federal spending programs; it outright mocked this argument. The losing party in Talevski, that decision explained, “urges us to reject decades of precedent” and to “rewrite” a key federal law to exempt federal spending programs from the Gonzaga rule. But Talevski “reject[s]” this “invitation to reimagine Congress’s handiwork (and our precedent interpreting it).”

Another possibility is that Medina is different from FS Credit because Medina involved a “Section 1983” lawsuit — a lawsuit brought under the federal law permitting individuals to bring civil rights claims against state governments and state officials — and FS Credit does not. Gorsuch’s Medina opinion describes the specific issue before his Court in that case as “whether the plaintiffs before us may maintain a § 1983 suit to enforce Medicaid’s any-qualified-provider provision “

But the problem with this distinction is that Gonzaga — the precedent behind the Court’s reasoning in FS Credit — was itself a Section 1983 case. So, for as long as Gonzaga has been the law, the Court has held that its rule applies to cases brought under Section 1983. Medina is the only exception.

Perhaps there is some other way to distinguish between Medina and FS Credit. But, again, the Court did not provide such an explanation in the FS Credit opinion. 

And, without such an explanation, it’s hard to escape the same conclusion that I reached a year ago, when Medina was first handed down. Medina was not decided in good faith. The actual holding of Medina is that abortion providers and their patients cannot enforce their rights, because the Republican justices say so. 

The central rule in any nation governed by the rule of law is that similar cases must be treated similarly, regardless of whether a group that individual judges dislike — or even view as morally repugnant — benefits from that rule. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1989 essay, “when, in writing for the majority of the Court, I adopt a general rule. … I not only constrain lower courts, I constrain myself as well.” Because “if the next case should have such different facts that my political or policy preferences regarding the outcome are quite the opposite, I will be unable to indulge those preferences.”

Medina fails the Scalia test. There cannot be a special carve out for abortion providers or abortion patients that denies them the same right to sue enjoyed by any other litigant.

Four men have pleaded guilty to rioting during the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) campus amid the anti-extradition protest and unrest seven years ago.

Cheung Chung-yiu, 24; Cheung Chin-ming, 29; Chan Chun-hei, 22; and Chan Yuen-ming, 33, appeared at the District Court on Monday morning to enter their pleas.

The four defendants were not prosecuted when they were first arrested in 2019 and 2020. However, they were re-arrested in June 2024 and charged with rioting at PolyU between November 14, 2019 and November 20, 2019.

The events at the Hung Hom campus were one of the most violent episodes during the protests and unrest in 2019, with protesters setting fires with petrol bombs as they faced off against police.

A fifth defendant, Lai Chun-kit, was not present. He has not attended hearings since October 2024, and an arrest warrant has been issued for him, The Witness reported.

According to the prosecution, CCTV footage captured the defendants’ behaviour during the riot. Cheung Chung-yiu was seen moving barriers to block a footbridge, while Cheung Chin-ming and Chan Chun-hei were filmed taking containers from a laboratory.

Chan Yuen-ming was seen walking around the university campus and taking a large flask and two bottles with him.

Mitigation

The four defendants had initially planned to plead not guilty and go forward with a trial, the court heard, but later changed their minds.

During mitigation, Cheung Chung-yiu’s lawyer said that the defendant had gone abroad to study before he was re-arrested in 2024, while Cheung Chin-ming’s lawyer told the court that his client had supported victims of the Wang Fuk Court fire in its aftermath.

A legal representative for Chan Chun-hei said the defendant was only 16 at the time of the incident. He worked in the construction sector and became a father at 21, his lawyer said, adding that he regretted what he had done when he was younger.

Chan Yuen-ming’s lawyer said his client was tricked into working at a scam farm in Thailand, returning to Hong Kong in 2022 after his family paid a ransom. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, the lawyer said.

The lawyer added that Chan Yuen-ming was sentenced to 18 years and five months in prison for a drug trafficking offence, and that he stands to face a long time in prison.

The four defendants will be sentenced on June 8. Rioting is punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, although jail terms handed down at the District Court are capped at seven years.

PUTRAJAYA, June 10 — Finding the courage to enter a courtroom is a lot to ask of a child, even more so to ask them to testify or recount abuses, what more to identify the accused.

In those moments, a reassuring face can make all the difference. That is where Victim Liaison Officers (VLOs) come in, to help them take that first step through the judicial process by making the unfamiliar feel a little less frightening.

Under the Chief Justice’s Practice Direction No. 1 of 2025 on the Operations of the Mobile Court for Children, a VLO is a Judiciary officer or staff member appointed by the Chief Registrar of the Federal Court to manage matters involving the use of the Children’s Mobile Court in criminal cases involving child victims or witnesses.

Informally, VLOs serve as trusted figures whom children can turn to for guidance and reassurance during court procedures and testimony recording sessions.

“They are the intermediaries between the victims, their families and the court.

“But most importantly, they are volunteers,” explained Registrar of the Subordinate Courts of Malaya Mohammed Mokhzani Mokhtar during a recent interview at the Palace of Justice here.

According to the Registrar’s Office, there are currently 42 active VLOs nationwide — six men and 36 women — serving in courts across every state.

Mohammed Mokhzani said the role played by VLOs under the Children’s Mobile Court initiative reflects the Judiciary’s commitment to ensuring that access to justice is not merely promised but meaningfully realised for vulnerable children.

The small but crucial workspace where trained VLOs support children throughout the court process with care and compassion. — Picture by Raymond Manuel

You’ve got a friend in me

As provided for under the Chief Justice’s Practice Direction, VLOs are generally assigned to proceedings involving cases under the Sexual Offences Against Children Act and remain involved throughout the process.

On trial days, VLOs must be ready at least 30 minutes before the Vehicle for Meaningful Redress (VMR) — a specially designated van used to transport child victims and witnesses in criminal trials — arrives at a child’s home.

VLOs are then assigned to the Victims’ Nexus to Justice (VNEJ) — a specially equipped mobile child witness room — where they accompany child victims or witnesses throughout proceedings and keep them and their next of kin informed of the court process until the case concludes.  

G Ishwary, a VLO attached to the Shah Alam Court Complex, said she introduces herself as kakak (elder sister in Bahasa Malaysia) and in some cases as ‘auntie’, particularly when dealing with younger victims.

This simple choice of address helps create familiarity and trust over time, making it easier for children to open up in what can otherwise be an intimidating setting.

“We also do away with our blazers to be as informal as possible, making us approachable and comfortable for the victims.

“Apart from anatomical dolls, we also have other toys for them to play with to make them more comfortable during our interactions later,” she told Malay Mail.

VLO G Ishwary speaks to Malay Mail during an interview at the Palace of Justice. — Picture by Raymond Manuel

In most of the cases she has handled, Ishwary said child victims or witnesses often hesitate when asked to give testimony, with the process of helping them open up taking time and patience.

In these instances, this reluctance stems from the emotional weight of what the children have endured, making it difficult for them to speak about their experiences in court.

“So we need to ensure they are calm enough to give clear testimony because they are giving evidence via video conference and the court holding the main hearing needs to listen clearly.

“For example, when prosecutors tender court exhibits, we also need to make sure they understand and fully comprehend the content of the documents being shown,” she said.

As an active VLO since the Children’s Mobile Court began in July last year, Ishwary recalled one recent case that left a deep impression on her.

“I remember it was a case in Pahang, and the victim was raped by her stepfather.

“The victim, who is now 15, had already begun giving her testimony on the first day, but on the second day she was hesitant when attempting to describe the incident in detail, and the hearing had to be postponed.

However, when the hearing resumed on the second day, the stepfather pleaded guilty.

“We did not get to finish the trial, but it impacted me greatly because as a stepfather, he raped her not once but twice, and I felt for the victim because she was 12-year-old when it happened,” she said.

The interior of the VNEJ where a child witness or victim provides their testimony via video conferencing in a safer and less intimidating setting under the guidance of a VLO. — Picture by Raymond Manuel

As the Children’s Mobile Court approaches its first anniversary since inception, Ishwary said the VNEJ has been instrumental in safeguarding the welfare of child victims and witnesses, allowing them to provide testimony remotely in a more comfortable environment.

“If they have moved or lack the facilities to attend court, the initiative is very helpful, although they may need time to adjust to it.

“But as VLOs, it is a crucial role that allows us to help victims affected by painful experiences and support them through the process,” she said.

Allen v. Milligan, an Alabama redistricting case that is now before the Supreme Court for the third time, is a face-palm, wrapped in a head-desk, wrapped in some of the most incompetent legislative draftsmanship that has ever been presented to the justices. If Alabama Republicans have any sense, they will fire all of their lawyers.

About a month ago, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, gutting the federal Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against legislative maps that lock voters of color out of power in the process. Callais effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which prohibited many state laws that have a negative impact of nonwhite voters, even if those laws were not drawn with racist intent.

After Callais, a plaintiff challenging a state’s legislative maps on racial grounds may only prevail “when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”

As a practical matter, this is a very difficult bar for voting rights plaintiffs to overcome. Lawyers and judges are not mind readers. And state lawmakers normally aren’t foolish enough to state openly that they drew a particular map in a particular way because they wanted to maximize white power and minimize the voting power of nonwhite voters.

And yet, Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature managed to enact congressional redistricting legislation that openly praises the European American character of much of the state.

Allen turns on congressional maps that the state enacted in a 2023 law, but which have never actually been used in an election. Much of the case turns on the law’s disparate treatment of two regions in the state: the Gulf Coast region of Alabama, and the state’s Black Belt.

While the Black Belt is actually named after the dark-colored soil in that region, it has a high African American population because many enslaved people were brought to the Black Belt prior to the Civil War. The Gulf Coast region, meanwhile, is predominantly white. As a lower court decision that struck down the 2023 maps explains, those maps keep “the Gulf Coast whole,” while simultaneously splitting the Black Belt in a way that shunts many of its Black voters into a majority-white district.

The mere fact that Alabama cracked up the Black Belt while keeping the Gulf Coast intact does not endanger its maps, at least under Callais. The decision is very favorable to gerrymandering, and permits states to draw maps that diminish Black representation so long as the state claims that it is doing so to dilute the votes of Democrats.

But here’s the rub: The 2023 law doesn’t just preserve the white-majority Gulf Coast region intact; it also praises the “shared culture” of that region which stems “from its French and Spanish colonial heritage.” France and Spain, of course, are European countries made up predominantly of white people.

The state legislature, in other words, didn’t just give the Gulf Coast more favorable treatment than it did the Black Belt. It explicitly referenced the Gulf Coast’s shared European culture when it did so. That sure gives rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred!

Will that be enough to persuade this Supreme Court to rule against Alabama’s maps? Who knows? The Court’s most recent gerrymandering decisions appear designed to permit states to draw whatever maps they want, without any federal judicial oversight whatsoever. And a decision in favor of Alabama’s 2023 maps would also benefit the Republican Party.

Six of the Supreme Court’s nine seats are held by Republicans.

But, even after Callais, one of the few things that states should not be allowed to do is draw maps for the explicit purpose of favoring European Americans, while simultaneously disfavoring African Americans. And yet Alabama’s maps may not be able to clear even this very low bar.

The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it will not decide Hamm v. Smith, a case involving a genuinely difficult constitutional question about whether an Alabama inmate may lawfully be executed.

The immediate upshot of this decision is that Joseph Clifton Smith, who’s at the heart of this case, will not be killed. Smith prevailed in the federal appeals court that previously heard his case. And the fact that the justices decided not to decide Hamm — they dismissed it “as improvidently granted,” to use the Court’s precise legal terminology — means that Smith’s victory in the lower court stands.

Though the full Court issued no opinion in Hamm, six justices joined at least one of three concurring or dissenting opinions revealing how they thought the case should have been decided. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s concurring opinion offers a likely explanation for why her Court chose to make this case go away. Meanwhile, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinions reveal some riffs among the Court’s Republicans.

In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with an intellectual disability. The Hamm case largely turned on whether Smith’s IQ is low enough that he qualifies as intellectually disabled. But most of the justices appear to have thrown up their hands and determined that they are not well-positioned to determine Smith’s IQ.

Sotomayor’s opinion suggests that Alabama may have lost this case because of inept lawyering. Among other things, she points out that none of the expert witnesses that testified in a lower court, including Alabama’s own expert, used the same methods to determine Smith’s IQ “that Alabama now claims is necessary.” 

Because the Supreme Court has the final word on questions of constitutional law, the justices are supposed to be reluctant to decide questions that are not fully vetted by lower courts, due to the risk that the Court could hand down an uncorrectable error if it decides a case too hastily. Thus, Sotomayor argues that her Court was right to “exercise caution” by not handing down the definitive word on a constitutional question that was not fully aired in other forums.

Meanwhile, at least some of the Republican justices appear to have backed away from more hardline positions that they took in the past. That means that at least some constitutional protections against capital punishment are probably safe, for now.

Most of the Republican justices appear to have made peace with Atkins

The Court’s right flank has historically opposed Atkins altogether. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, claimed in Atkins that only “severely or profoundly” disabled people — perhaps those with an IQ of 25 or lower — are protected from execution. But, under the Atkins framework, people with an IQ of 70 or below are often ineligible for the death penalty. And people who test slightly higher than 70, such as Smith himself, may also sometimes show that they are intellectually disabled by pointing to other factors besides IQ.

But only Thomas, who wrote a dissenting opinion in Hamm that was joined by no one else, called for Atkins to be overruled.

It’s particularly surprising that Justice Neil Gorsuch, who previously has expressed very hardline views in death penalty cases, appeared to chart a more moderate course in Hamm. Gorsuch seemed to suggest in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019) that his Court should toss out the entirety of its past 60 years worth of cases interpreting the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments, and instead adopt a new rule that would allow the government to impose very high penalties for minor crimes. 

But, of the three Hamm opinions, only Thomas cited Bucklew. And Gorsuch neither joined Thomas’s opinion nor did he join some parts of Alito’s opinion, which called for harsher rules in Atkins cases. So it appears that Gorsuch’s Bucklew opinion may be an orphan.

Alito, meanwhile, wrote a bifurcated opinion, major parts of which were joined by a total of four justices — Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts, Thomas, and Gorsuch. But only Thomas joined the part of Alito’s opinion which called for the most limits on Atkins.

The parts of Alito’s opinion that were joined by four justices largely concern the unusual facts present in Hamm. 

It’s safe to say that Smith’s claim that he is intellectually disabled is marginal. While courts consider whether a capital defendant’s IQ is below 70 in order to determine if that defendant is intellectually disabled, Smith took several tests that measured his IQ somewhere in the 70s — and none of them showed that he has an IQ of 70 or below.

Under the Court’s previous death penalty cases, the fact that a death row inmate tests slightly above 70 is not fatal to his Atkins case — in part because IQ tests have a margin of error and may overestimate a test subject’s IQ. But Alito essentially argues that someone like Smith, who took multiple tests that showed him with an IQ above 70, may be executed.

In the part of his opinion joined only by Thomas, meanwhile, Alito claims that “‘higher scores are likely to be more indicative’ of a person’s intelligence than the lower scores,” a rule that would potentially doom capital defendants with a wide range of scores, some of which are below 70.

Still, it’s notable that Alito focused his opinion so closely on the minutiae of the Hamm case, without making broader attacks on Atkins or on the general rule that intellectually disabled people may not be executed. It is tough to evaluate where the full Court stands on Atkins, as three justices — Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were silent in Hamm. But it now appears likely that the Court’s current majority does not plan a wholesale assault on Atkins, or on the Court’s broader framework for determining which punishments are impermissible. That’s good news for inmates whose lives could be spared by Atkins and similar cases.

The Court’s Republican majority is often hostile to past precedents that were decided by more liberal justices. Indeed, at times, they appear to have been going through a checklist, overruling decisions where the Court’s right flank lost and transforming dissents by justices like Scalia or Thomas into majority opinions. But, for now, at least, it appears that Atkins is not on this Court’s checklist.