Apparently judicial immunity is supposed to mean “immunity from any criticism”
By 
Steve Vladeck has an amusing and disturbing — more the latter, given the circumstances — description of his encounter with 5th circuit judge Edith Jones at the big annual Federalist Society conference last week. Vladeck shouldn’t be doing these kinds of panels, given what the Federalist Society has so obviously become, which he sort of acknowledges in the post, but that’s not the point here.
Instead the point is that Edith Jones is an authoritarian hack, and an idiot of the first degree, with lifetime tenure and no meaningful constraint on her behavior, which in this case included some pathetic McCarthyite gestures. In response to Vladeck’s intentionally non-partisan example of the problems inherent in judge-shopping — he pointed out that, nationwide, 23% of patent cases last year were filed in Texas’s 24th-largest city — Jones pulled out the old I have a list of names and documents here stunt:
Judge Jones didn’t respond at all to my patent example—even though it seems to provide rather powerful evidence that the debate over judge-shopping is not a partisan one. Instead, apparently having been waiting for me to disavow such attacks, Judge Jones pulled out a manila folder that she claimed was full of my blog posts, tweets, amicus briefs, and other writings on the subject (honestly, given how much work I’ve done in the field, it seemed pretty thin). And she proceeded to read out individual tweets (that one of her law clerk presumably found, printed out, and highlighted—I leave to others whether that’s an appropriate use of federal judicial resources) as evidence of how I have been “personally attacking” the judges in these cases, and had engaged in a series of “ad hominems,” with the purpose, she claimed, of intimidating these judges. This wasn’t off the cuff; it was a set-up.
Jones then went on to blame Vladeck’s extremely measured and completely justified criticisms of one 5th circuit judge for purported death threats against him:
In perhaps the most ominous moment of the session, she then insisted that I was directly responsible for death threats that she claims Judge Kacsmaryk (and his family) has received. If Judge Kacsmaryk has indeed received such threats, that is gravely concerning (and illegal, if within the scope of the true threats doctrine). But it ought not to be a controversial view that federal judges should not be publicly blaming individual critics for provoking those threats without even attempting to connect the dots from the critics’ arguments to such threatening behavior.
Jones’s view only makes sense if you assume that all criticism of the decisions of federal judges are bad as axiomatic matter, and that anything undesirable that can be attributed, however implausibly, to such criticisms is the responsibility of the critic.
Additionally, Jones is such a jurisprudential giant that she thinks “liberal organizations judge-shop as well” is some sort of cogent response to criticisms of judge-shopping.
Things then got really weird:
As if all of that wasn’t weird/sad enough, when we turned to audience Q&A, the panel ended with a (clearly staged) spectacle—in which 97-year-old Federal Circuit Judge Pauline Newman, who Judge Jones had told Judge Ho to call upon before she had even stood up, described her plight (she has been suspended from hearing new cases by her colleagues over claims of age-related judicial disability—for which she is currently suing them), and asked what it portends for judicial independence. If I’d had a chance to respond, I might have noted that the whole point of the procedures created by the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 is that Congress has left it to Judge Newman’s fellow independent judges to resolve her fate. There are definitely issues that can arise from judges policing themselves, but judicial independence … isn’t one of them. I didn’t get the chance to say anything, though; Judge Jones had a canned (and sympathetic) answer at the ready.
Like the contents of Judge Jones’s manila folder, we were just props.
Yeah that’s “I’m Boycotting All Yale Law Student” Judge Ho, whose name under the circumstances is almost forcing me to make a terrible pun, which I am refusing to do. Because of the children.