Courts

Judge Earns Misconduct Complaint After Ordering Lawyers Take Training Classes From Anti-LGBTQ Group

Maybe judges can't just reverse engineer opinions for shock value.

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Dictionary Series – EthicsJudge Brantley Starr got the headlines he so dearly craved when he ordered a group of Southwest Airlines in-house attorneys to take training courses and pegged a recognized hate group for the job in a slap in the face to ethics CLE providers everywhere.

His slapdash reasoning has sparked an appeal that even the Fifth Circuit might take seriously, having saddled Southwest with this obligation based on bad analogies and a semantic dispute over verb tenses that would offend even the most pedantic of grammar fascists.

But he’s also generated a misconduct complaint over his botched legal analysis.

Yesterday, Gabe Roth of the judicial watchdog Fix the Court filed a complaint with the Judicial Council of the Fifth Circuit laying out the serious ethical problems with the Starr opinion.

Judge Starr’s opinion goes to some lengths to lay out the court’s power to issue “training” as an ethical sanction. He just never found any precedent for religious training as opposed to, you know, ethics training.

Of course, “training” can at times be a fair sanction, especially in the realm of ethics, so it’s worth considering the various examples of court-mandated training Judge Starr cites in his order, largely in footnotes 66 and 67, at 20. As you can see, not one is religion-based, underscoring the unprecedented nature of the sanction. (Judge Starr could have assigned ethics training, given that in his view Southwest did not follow through on his earlier order, but he specifically chose not to.)

Southwest had fired a flight attendant for violating the company’s civility policies when she ranted on social media about the company and her union supporting sex trafficking cover-ups and organ harvesting. Since she cited her religious beliefs as the basis for these unhinged rants, she prevailed on a discrimination claim.

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Starr’s most recent order strained against logic and the English language to assert that Southwest failed to comply with his earlier order to inform employees that it can no longer discriminate on religious grounds by informing employees that, per the order, it would not discriminate on religious grounds. Starr found that this amounted to a legal ethics breach and with this flimsiest of ins, brought Alliance Defending Freedom into the mix to provide Southwest’s in-house team with the re-education camp experience.

Despite no basis in law for that result.

Trying desperately to find a similar example, Judge Starr notes, at 23, that ADF will conduct a “‘First Amendment training session’ for three professors who allegedly discriminated against a student three professors at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.” But that’s not apposite: that session was agreed to by both parties as part of a lawsuit settlement. That Southwest is appealing the training requirement here demonstrates the incongruity.

Alas, there’s not a lot of reason to have faith in the judiciary’s ability to self-police these days.

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I suppose that’s doubly true if you’ve already got a life-tenured federal judgeship and the judicial misconduct process amounts to an inconvenience at best.

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And Judge Starr wants publicity so bad.

Earlier: Trump Judge Orders In-House Lawyers To Take Classes From Anti-LGBTQ Group

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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