9th Circuit Judge Busts Out Handguns From Tote Bag In A Federal Courthouse For His Dissent in Duncan
This is the next episode in our series of dissents in the En Banc resolution of Duncan v. Bonta (Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, 20 March 2025).
This episode is part 1 of Judge VanDyke's epic dissent in that resolution which caught a lot of controversy because part of his dissent was a link to the following website : https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/media/23-55805/opinion , which, as you'll see, does not go to the Ninth Circuit federal government website but instead goes to YouTube, the Ninth Circuit's YouTube channel.
The link for the En Banc opinion of the Court as well as the dissents covered here can be found here :
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/03/20/23-55805.pdf
These materials, the text and the video linked within the text of Judge VanDyke's dissent are in the public domain and have no copyright restrictions upon them. I have done the best I could, given the technology, to make a fair use of them with a transformative reading for educational purposes only.
The controversy around the video includes not merely that Judge VanDyke, a Trump appointee to the Court, included video as a supplement embedded within his dissent, which he (and the Court) clearly consider to be official parts of his dissent, but what he filmed there in the federal courthouse in Reno, Nevada (probably, since that's where his chambers are according to the US Ninth Circuit's seniority website.
He filmed, in his chambers, wearing his black robe, with views on the video to the tune of hundreds of thousands, a tote bag with his own guns, his own handguns, real firearms. He mentioned that the firearms used for the video were rendered inoperable, unloaded, and safe for purposes of the educational part of the dissent. He claimed to be filling in missing background information useful for understanding the record before the court, not for supplementing the record per se with his, the Judge's, testimony -- something that would be not only unusual but inappropriate.
I'd love to hear what you think in the comments.
The Republican Professor is a pro-correctly-articulating-civil-liberties podcast.
Therefore, welcome Judge VanDyke .
The Republican Professor is produced and hosted by Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D.
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