Judge Apologizes to Conservative Justices in Case Over N.I.H. Cuts

Source: NY Times

Nearly two weeks after two Supreme Court justices delivered a stinging rebuke warning lower-court judges not to “defy” their rulings, the judge at whom the directive was aimed issued an apology from the bench, pledging to adjust to meet the highest court’s demands.

The acknowledgment on Tuesday by Judge William G. Young in Federal District Court in Massachusetts highlighted the precarious position that lower courts have landed in this year as they struggle to make sense of a growing number of unsigned orders the Supreme Court has produced through the court’s emergency

Writing as part of that emergency order, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh had suggested that Judge Young subverted the court’s will by failing to apply an earlier emergency order focused on canceled Education Department grants to his N.I.H. case.

“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Young, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/us/politics/judge-apology-conservative-justices.html