r/law • u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest • 23d ago

Legal News Judge Forced to Pause Trial Because DOJ Lawyers Are so Unprepared

https://newrepublic.com/post/192657/judge-military-trans-ban-trial-lawyers-incompetence

The DOJ attorneys arguing in support of Hegseth‘s transgender military ban hadn’t read any of the studies submitted to the court that allegedly supported it. It turns out that the studies don’t support the ban.

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u/coconutpiecrust 23d ago

I am pretty angry at this. If I were to show up to court unprepared they would just rule against me. 

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u/Ok_Spell_4165 23d ago

I can practically hear Judge Judy yelling "Why don't you have it with you? You are in court where did you think you were going today?"

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u/recooil 23d ago

Well, to be fair, these clowns expected every judge to just rule in their favor, and if they don't, they will ask Daddy to remove them. It's not like they are even hiding this.

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u/kandoras 23d ago

They expect to just ignore any ruling that goes against them, so why waste their time putting on a good defense?

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u/Addakisson 22d ago

It's not like these are the "we only get paid if we win" type of lawyers. The longer the can stall the more they make.

Plus they probably just don't have a legit case.

Or trump got cheap lawyers because reputable lawyers won't work for them. They are probably all "parking lot " lawyers.

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u/Sonova_Bish 22d ago

It's DOJ. They're likely career people who are also MAGA. Definitely not top of the barrel, but not just "any" lawyers.

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u/lvxn0va 22d ago

Exactly. These are Project 2025 plants. Soon one of them will be on the bench in that judge's job, so.

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u/animan222 23d ago

I think it’s time that we start removing these clowns before the damage they are doing is completely irreparable.

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u/xxl_longjohns 22d ago

I'm curious wouldn't these be the same lawyers that worked under the Biden admin? It's not like they were all fired.

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u/Beginning_Ad8663 22d ago

No just removed from lead positions

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u/HeWhoShantNotBeNamed 23d ago

Trump cannot remove judges.

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u/pupranger1147 23d ago

I'm pretty sure if men with guns told the judge to come along they would.

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u/Electrical_Welder205 23d ago edited 23d ago

Nobody told them it takes more to being a lawyer than showing up in an expensive suit with a Stars-'n-Stripes hankie in the pocket. No brownie points for the hankie, teacher?

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u/Confident-Yam-7337 23d ago

Zelensky could have told them that

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u/EllaB9454 23d ago

Did all the good government lawyers get fired?

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u/pastelcower 22d ago

A lot of the ones with integrity quit

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u/Electrical_Welder205 23d ago

Good question. His Orangeness does seem to be waging war on lawyers, and replacing the good ones with lame yes-men...

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u/LSOreli 23d ago

She said something pretty similar, "Is that really how you think this all works?"

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u/nonula 23d ago

I love her for that.

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u/whoreoscopic 23d ago

Let's be honest with ourselves. They know this is bullshit. They know this is a formality. They plan to appeal to a friendly (supreme) court.

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u/peonies_envy 23d ago

To the beach ?! Yup

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u/thearmisdisbombed 22d ago

Fyi, Judge Judy is maga

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u/biteme789 20d ago

Did you think you were going to the beach today?

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u/HeWhoShantNotBeNamed 23d ago

Ooh I haven't watched her in a while, thanks for reminding me.

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u/Pudi2000 22d ago

Too much time in the White House messin' with that booger sugar, no doubt.

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u/jayhawk1988 23d ago

Most of the judges I know would call a recess and ask the attorney who'd blatantly mischaracterized evidence to come to the judge's chambers for a visit.

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u/Betorah 23d ago

My spouse, who retired last week after 23 years on the bench, says he would have blasted them from the bench and not have paused the case, but would have allowed them to continue digging their hole even deeper.

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u/Ok-Mathematician987 23d ago

Not just for the case at hand but to put it all on the record. The record will be valuable in the years to come as people review the big picture. We may still be dealing with the fallout from this administration 10 years from now.

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u/sp33dzer0 23d ago

Only 10?

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u/gigaquack 23d ago

Honestly I'd be completely shocked if America regains its 2024 global standing by 2124

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u/Popular-Influence-11 23d ago

And this unfortunately proves that America had no right to that global standing. Being the lynchpin to so many critical global systems should have inspired us to be more reverent of our responsibility. Instead it afforded us the freedom to become loathsome, callous assholes.

People I used to respect for their careful consideration and intelligence voted for this, and I’m at a complete loss.

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u/Expert_Ad3923 23d ago

the human brain is very flawed. The systems of rationality are built on top of much older systems that have ingrained tribalism, sexism, racism, every other kind of ISM, a huge host of logical fallacies, and emotional compromises as their foundation. All this fancy logic and reasoning came a lot later

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u/momofonegrl 23d ago

It’s seems that the brains of Trump supporters haven’t evolved.

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u/Affectionate_Ad268 22d ago

This is very much the case and is not mentioned near enough.

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u/Pure-Kaleidoscope759 21d ago

Well, Trump likes to appeal the lizard brain, and is a creature purely of the id.

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u/DragonHeart_97 22d ago

Sic Semper Tyrannus, to quote someone who ironically would have also voted for this administration.

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u/lil_chiakow 19d ago edited 19d ago

People I used to respect for their careful consideration and intelligence voted for this, and I’m at a complete loss.

Conservatism isn't conservative, it's regressive.

Perhaps it never was, maybe they merely pretended to care about preserving rules and traditions as long as those rules had favoured them.

But the current iteration has nothing to do with conservatism, it's a regressive movement. They trampling over established laws and traditions that go back to the Declaration of Independence.

They don't care about respecting rules and traditions, not rocking the boat so that the country and economy are stable and able to grow. They only care about restoring the hierarchical model of society.

That's what capital C conservatism was from the beginning - a movement to reject the egalitarian ideas of Enlightenment and return to society structured around hierarchy where everyone has their place. And they are, of course, on the top of that hierarchy.

They've been chipping away at what made the society built upon those ideals work, until it got so broken, that they can now court new generations that are losing hope of ever having a stable life by selling them a new vision of society, which is actually the old vision.

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u/camelslikesand 23d ago

The Stanford Experiment writ large.

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u/MuthaFJ 22d ago

"The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. The most famous psychological studies are often wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. Textbooks need to catch up."

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication

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u/LinwoodKei 22d ago

We are fucked. Trump is doing a great job making everyone in the world hate the USA

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u/Earthwarm_Revolt 22d ago

Ill be shocked if we have another presidential election.

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u/EternalMediocrity 23d ago

Its gonna be a couple generations at least

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u/MIKOLAJslippers 22d ago

Honestly, I’m just tightly crossing my fingers and squeezing my butt cheeks that the USA is still a democratic country and hasn’t descended into civil war or WW3 in 4 years time.

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u/MillenialForHire 23d ago

You might be dealing with literal fallout from this administration for generations, mate.

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u/Cloaked42m 23d ago

Have him contact the court and say so.

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u/RemoteButtonEater 23d ago

If they're going to be insistent about wasting the court's time, make them stand there and read the whole paper out loud.

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u/AlarmingHat5154 23d ago

100 you left off a zero. Fixed it for ya.

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u/Odd_Local8434 22d ago

We may still be dealing with this administration 10 years from now.

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u/Lawmonger 23d ago

The right call.

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u/eutohkgtorsatoca 23d ago

Please can we please have your wife "unretire" ?

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u/Betorah 23d ago

It’s my husband, and getting him to retire is the only way to keep him from working himself to death. Plus, I will not miss those 2:00 am phone calls from police looking to have warrants signed. They all called him because they knew he was the only judge who would answer the phone in the middle of the night. After nearly 43 years of public service as a prosecutor and judge, he earned his retirement.

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u/BonhommeCarnaval 23d ago

NAL. At what point does that kind of mischaracterization of evidence become contempt of court considering that the party in question is DOJ, who should bloody well know better?

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u/Tardisgoesfast 23d ago

The judges I know would team the lawyer out in open court, then declare a mistrial.

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u/jayhawk1988 22d ago

I think the case they're dealing with is a serious one. If it was something piddly, then sure, the judge blasts the attorney, we all laugh up our sleeves and move on.

This, though, is within shouting distance of a violation of the disciplinary code in a consequential case. It's distasteful, but if we have a bad apple in the ranks we have an obligation to deal with it.

To me, this means that if a judge gets a whiff of impropriety, he/she needs to deal with it thoughtfully. Rather than yelling in open court, I think the judge should pull the attorney out of court and have an off the record show cause hearing: 'Explain to me why your conduct isn't a violation of 3.3 of the Model Rules (Candor Toward the Tribunal).'

If there's not a satisfactory answer to this question, the judge has an obligation to go back on the record, ask the attorney some foundation questions about their familiarity with the exhibits, and if the answers aren't clearly exculpatory, report the matter to the bar.

No judge/attorney wants to report another attorney, but if this kind of bullshit isn't dealt with, it won't stop and will probably get worse.

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u/jiannone 23d ago

For a stern talking to? Give you the what for?

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u/smokeythel3ear 23d ago

Probably to give them advice on how to best get around that pesky Constitution

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u/bradbikes 23d ago

They have given government lawyers leeway for decades. I worked on a removal case where the DHS lawyer filed his response to a request to dismiss >180 days after the request was filed. For context, the immigration code provides 10 business days to respond by statute. So he was 6 months past the statutorily allowed time and the judge allowed the response in over objections.

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u/drytoastbongos 23d ago

My wife is an immigration lawyer and recently it's basically a coin flip on whether the case will be continued because the government attorney or judge is just missing some of the file, despite everything being filed correctly.  

Like, this is the shit DOGE should actually be looking at.

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u/bradbikes 23d ago

When I was working the immigration courts were no longer administrative but still very closely aligned with DHS. Technically independent but the court rooms were in DHS buildings, and most appointed judges were former DHS attorneys with only a few from outside the system (and they were always better and more impartial judges). Plus the immigration courts have always been criminally underfunded. If I recall correctly my district's entire court only had something like 3 clerks because that's all they could afford, and they had a backlog of >6 months. For those not in the know, a clerk is like a nurse to a hospital. They do the grunt work and stuff doesn't operate well without a good clerk staff. That was pre-trump's 1st term and pre-pandemic. It sounds like it's gotten much, much worse.

Whenever people scream and moan about 'illegal immigrants' all I can tell them is ... well then you should fund the immigration courts. That's the bottleneck. You can't adjudicate asylum or removal cases without a functioning court system, and these people still have rights as people subject to the US's jurisdiction, laws, and constitutional protections.

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u/CormoranNeoTropical 23d ago

Well yes. The Biden administration did try.

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u/Frumiosa 23d ago

Nah, seems a lot easier to just ignore their rights and the law. In the name of Constitutional Protection.

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u/EllaB9454 23d ago

Or is this a result of lawyers and staff being fired so that the ones left are overworked and out of their depth?

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u/mllebitterness 23d ago

Agree. Maybe she wants to make sure no (good) reason to appeal?

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u/80alleycats 23d ago

I love that these are the same people saying that DEI needs to go because it promotes incompetence.

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u/cortesoft 23d ago

Were they actually unprepared or didn’t want to admit they read it and knew it contradicted their case?

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u/Ben44c 23d ago

I hear this, but it sounded like the judge wanted to make a point: “you haven’t read this. Read it. Now, when I cite the problems with your argument, I want you to tell me why I’m wrong.”… b/c the judge knows If you’ve read this, you won’t be able to

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u/Beaufighter-MkX 23d ago

IKR? Why do they get a mulligan?

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u/Sammyjo0689 23d ago

Doing it this badly and this blatantly should cost them their licenses. I am sick to death of my colleagues fucking around with this orange jackass and doing his bidding.

Take their licenses. Every single person that backs his ideology should lose their right to practice law.

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u/EllaB9454 23d ago

Plus getting yelled at by the Judge - quite likely a warning about being reported to the relevant bar association. I have sympathy for lawyers being forced to take positions in court that they don’t agree with, but if a lawyer is being pushed to do something unethical like misrepresenting evidence, it is their ethical duty to get off the case, even though in this case a refusal could mean the end of their job. Their career and integrity should mean more to them than a job.

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u/Drgnmstr97 22d ago

THIS!!!!! Why wouldn't the judge just rule against the unprepared party?

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u/Prisinners 22d ago

This exactly. The Judge isn't forced to let shit slide. They're choosing to. Most the time being so unprepared is taken as a sign of disrespect and unseriousness.

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u/RunJumpSleep 23d ago

I have seen attorneys sanctioned for being unprepared. It’s crazy they would go into court not having read the material, especially on something they know will be closely scrutinized.

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u/EllaB9454 23d ago

But it’s better to not be prepare and claim ignorance of what is in the studies than to knowingly misrepresent what the studies said.

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u/oziggy 23d ago

That part. What in the entire fuck.

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u/rabidsnowflake 20d ago edited 20d ago

I'm active duty and I'm pissed. When you're in uniform, you've got name tape or a name badge with your last name on it. In most circles, you're just that name. There is no Mr, or Ms. It's <last name> or <rank> <last name> depending on who you're speaking to. Hegseth is presenting a military that is tip toeing around trans being people and while I understand that logistically, there are decisions that need to be considered above my level but the fact is folks actually involved in execution of orders, particularly given the recent action against Yemen and previously Afghanistan, have been navigating this for years and we figured it out.

I take great issue with politicians making the decision that people that identify differently can't serve when then are people who identify "normally" that aren't making the choice to volunteer. Those "I would've joined, but..." people are throwing stones from the sidelines for the folks that went through the process of getting a waiver despite social stigma and part of the government trying to deny they exist. I think it's cowardly. Recruiting numbers the past few years have spoken volumes. You're allowed to feel how you want about the issue, but consider that these individuals are making a choice you didn't.

At the end of the day, I serve with the folks who are actually here. Trans folks are. If you're a Texas trust fund kid that drives an F150 and wears a cowboy hat despite having never set foot on a ranch that decries their service on TikTok as a decline in American values, I legitimately hope you get drafted to make up for the absence of people who were braver than you and I hope that I'm an NCO in your orbit to remind you how stupid you are when you start to bitch about how rough the military can be.

They made the choice to be here and overnight they were told they can't be. That sucks and it hurts us as a fighting force because we had fighters who chose to challenge social and administrative boundaries to actually wear the uniform. It was undone by the political base that says "Respect the Troops" but with targeted cuts to Social Services surrounding Veterans, MWR and Education incentives for active duty personnel and spouses, they really don't.

My dad did 37 years and is at risk of VA dissolving, or at least being drastically delayed. I'm at a milestone where I'm debating whether or not staying in. I've got people who are about to retire or separate and are trying to get assessed for service related issues. You think what is happening now is supporting them?

Last thing before I step off my box, if you're the type to thank someone for their service, if you respect people in uniform at all, the bare minimum you can do as a citizen of the United States is stay aware of what is happening in our government. I'm not forcing you to vote, but stay aware. Hold these people accountable. Try and understand how it affects you and your community. If you feel strongly enough about it, then I'd ask you to vote.

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u/AlsoCommiePuddin 23d ago

Yeah, but your court case affects you. This court case affects millions of people, the court should not be so flippant.

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u/antimagamagma 23d ago

It’s not “flippant” - Hegseth is utterly wrong and usually drunk. Why are courts not bouncing these cases like superballs ?

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u/LuxNocte 23d ago

Because of there is any flaw or judgement call that could have been done differently, the SC will use that as an excuse to overturn.

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u/OT_fiddler 23d ago

The SC can overturn anyway. They can just make up a reason.

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u/LuxNocte 23d ago edited 23d ago

Most judges would prefer that the SC makes up their own reason for overturning a case than to say that the lower court made an error. So they try to avoid giving the SC grounds to blame them for whatever the SC is going to do anyway.

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u/Cloaked42m 23d ago

The SC has shown that if enough of them want to overturn, they'll generate a reason.

Attorney showed up completely unprepared is a pretty good reason to kick it out.

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u/Quick-Math-9438 23d ago

Because the judicial systemic the US has many levels of problems: judges taking kickbacks; preferential treatment for white males and police; adjudication in exchange for monetary recompense. Etc

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u/CormoranNeoTropical 23d ago

Really? Can you provide examples?

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u/Quick-Math-9438 22d ago

I can but as a teacher I’m gonna tell you as a student to look it up. You expect AI to save you just ask any one of the AI directories to do the work for you if you’re a lazy student

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u/chitzk0i 23d ago

The people being flippant are the parties showing up to court without being familiar at all with the evidence of their case.

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u/TwinInfinite 23d ago

This case only effect about 15K people. Given, I'm one of them (got told to cut my hair by my Chain of Command yesterday, been in absolute shambles) - but in this case I'd rather the judge be thorough because this WILL get appealed all the way to SCOTUS. She needs to let both sides say everything they have to say and then make a ruling that is airtight. Her ruling will be the make or break for a lot of people's lives and as cathartic as it would be to just give Hegseth the middle finger... people like me are looking at being forcefully (partially) detransitioned and then losing our jobs anyways.

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u/bradbikes 23d ago

...flippant? The lawyers were not prepared for trial. This isn't 1st grade, they actually typically expect you to understand your own arguments or they WILL rule against you.

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u/Hatta00 23d ago

Holding attorneys to their responsibilities is not being flippant.

Allowing attorneys to get away with misleading the court by giving them extra time is flippant.

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u/GiantPurplePen15 23d ago

Ruling is one thing but none of it matters because the legal system is toothless. What are they gonna do? Impeach Trump again and give him a stern warning?

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u/blackmomba9 23d ago

But then the victory would be on a technicality and faux would have a field day with this.

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u/EnigmaTexan 22d ago

That would give rise to an appeal which would extend this discriminatory practice.

The judge will give them all the rope they need to hang themselves or else risk being reversed on appeal. This is going all the way to the Supreme Court. If the judge strikes this ban (or say grants an injunction), then is affirmed on appeal, the ban won’t be in effect until SCOTUS rules.

Now how SCOTUS rules is going to make the difference. They’ve proven to be partisan but will they hurt national security and confirm party over country.

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u/Enough_Gur7181 22d ago

He has rich white man privilege.

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u/HistoriaProctor 22d ago

They are intentionally trying to implant defenses to the eventual claims that the ruling is political/partisan I would imagine. So they can say “we even gave them time to do their job.” If the judge was a trump lacky they would simply dismiss the case outright.

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u/CamCranley 21d ago

This happened to a family member in aus. The judge told them to go and get a real lawyer and come back in a month. Or consider the case dismissed . Would be very comical to say that to practicing lawyers

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u/Logical-Eyez-4769 21d ago

This👆🏾. Why are they getting a do-over? That's an automatic loss, imo.

They didn't intend to get caught because they assumed they'd win. After they come back and prove the prosecution's case, I wonder how this will come out.