Personal, Political Tensions Among US Judges Go Public in 2025

Judges haven’t been holding back on the bench this year—and sometimes their frustrations are directed toward one another.

There’s been no shortage of strong language toward President Donald Trump’s administration and its lawyers in court rulings. But federal judges, including members of the Supreme Court, have also faced judicial ire in 2025.

Here’s a look at some of the most noteworthy lines by judges about judges from the past year.

Supreme Court Criticism

Several judges have taken issue with the Supreme Court’s emergency docket rulings, as the justices pause or overturn lower court decisions without full briefing or reasoning. Some lower court judges have said those orders leave them with little guidance on how to address similar issues when they come up again.

Trial court judges in Massachusetts, California, and Washington, DC, are among those who have been critical of the justices’ moves.

“Bluntly put, why the Court ruled as it did remains unclear—and without reasoning, this order cannot even be considered as persuasive,” Senior US District Judge Beryl Howell, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in a Dec. 2 opinion, about a Supreme Court order that paused a lower court decision against federal immigration stops without reasonable suspicion.

Some members of the high court have defended the lack of specifics: Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the justices don’t want to bind lower courts to a certain outcome at an early stage of a case.

‘Not A Denny’s’

Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit got creative with his analogies in May, as he expressed concern with the amount of time a district court judge had to rule on potential removals of Venezuelan migrants under a wartime law.

Ho said he was worried that the trial judge, as well as Trump and other officials, weren’t treated with respect in the case. The Supreme Court had wrongly started counting down the time that US District Judge Wes Hendrix had to consider a late-night emergency temporary restraining order against the removal of detained Venezuelan migrants, he said.

“We seem to have forgotten that this is a district court—not a Denny’s,” said Ho, a Trump appointee. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone suggest that district judges have a duty to check their dockets at all hours of the night, just in case a party decides to file a motion.”

Ho has also been critical of district court judges: In April he took a swipe at Chief US District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg over his handling of another challenge to the deportation of Venezuelan migrants, saying the Washington-based judge “had no lawful business deciding” that case as it belonged in another court.

‘Darkness Descends’

Judge Jerry Smith, also on the Fifth Circuit, didn’t hold back as he unleashed a torrent of allegations and complaints against US District Judge Jeffrey Brown, in a Nov. 19 dissenting opinion issued in a Texas gerrymandering case.

The start of the dissent, which totaled 104 pages, was dedicated to criticizing Brown’s handling of the opinion’s release. Smith, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said he had personal matters including the funeral of another judge that meant he couldn’t work on Brown’s timeline for publishing the opinion. He said Brown hadn’t given him and his clerks enough time to read the draft majority opinion so they could respond to it.

Smith said Brown had also acted to reach his preferred outcome in the litigation, calling it “the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.” Brown, a Trump appointee, has declined to comment on the dissent.

“Darkness descends on the Rule of Law,” Smith wrote.

Show, Not Tell

Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the Ninth Circuit chose an unconventional route in breaking from his colleagues in a Second Amendment case, by filing a video dissent in the case.

The March video, a format apparently never used before to deliver a federal court opinion, showed VanDyke in his chambers as he went over the components of several handguns. The Trump appointee was dissenting from an en banc ruling that upheld a law limiting gun magazine capacity to 10 or fewer rounds.

VanDyke said in the video that after arguments in the case, “it became clear to me that many, including both California’s counsel and my colleagues in the majority of this case, lack the basic familiarity with handguns to understand the inherent shortcomings and obvious inadministrability of the test that California was proposing and which the majority in this case has now adopted.”

The video dissent in turn was subject to pushback by some other members of the Ninth Circuit, who said the circuit’s rules mandate that opinions be written and that VanDyke appeared to be acting as an expert witness.