James Ho

We'll talk now about, uh, Judge Ho.

Uh, Judge Ho has, uh, this is James Ho, I guess we gotta, we gotta make clear that we aren't talking about Dale Ho, uh, which is al- who's also a federal judge, but a very different one.

Uh, James Ho of the Fifth Circuit, and one of the stories from last week, this is a double duty stor- uh, piece, uh, segment, uh, 'cause we have two stories on him.

Uh, his story last week, he took some time out of what was a very straightforward per curiam, uh, opinion, which was about a magistrate judge who had been ...

He was being considered for a district court job, uh, and one of the parties to the case wrote that person ex parte with some, "You know I know some senators", and so on and so forth, which was ...

He quotes for this something called the audition trap, which is a term coined by Professor Blackman in a, in a blog post a few years ago.

Uh, now Jud- uh, uh, Josh Blackman.

Now, the, uh, Judge Ho doesn't get into this, but Josh Blackman in that blog post was talking about James Ho-

Right? And, and, and people we know and people we like saying that, "Of course Alito is gonna hang up his robes on November 4th if Democrats win back the Senate," and, and that would be to let Donald Trump nominate his successor in that lame duck session between November 4th and January 3rd, 2027, when Trump could presumably still get a replacement crammed through.

Um, and, and I am certain that Judge James Ho or Justin Walker, whichever fascist wannabe Donald Trump decides on, would, would be delighted to take on Alito's existing clerks, right? Make sure they, they keep-

Right

... their job.

But on the plus side, the dean search committee contains three circuit court judges.

Mm.

That would be James Ho and Andy Oldham from the Fifth Circuit, and Amul Thapar from the Sixth Circuit.

Uh, gosh, I wonder what those three dudes have in common.

Thanks a lot to the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a great idea to put this very quick symposium together to get initial reactions to Trump versus Barbara.

It's great to be here with my podcast co-host, Linda Denno, and to be here with Eric Wessan, who clerked for Judge Jim Ho, who was one of my many subordinates at the Justice Department.

Unfortunately, I taught him absolutely nothing that he learned.

You can't get override that University of Chicago training with sensible Yale Law School theories.

Professor Yoo, I saw you had a point.

Yeah.

A sorry day it is when you see a former law clerk disagree with the judge for whom they clerked because General Wesson here is contradicting Jim Ho's article about this very question, which I have not, I admit, paged through all the debates about the 14th Amendment.

They are voluminous, and I do know Kurt Lash and Elan Morman have had law review articles out recently about this.

Um, you know, I, I litigated some cases adjacent to this and, uh, many years ago.

And at that time it was like, Oh, well, you know, there's one position by certain originalists, um, who say, uh, um, some of whom I have a lot of respect for John, you and judge Jim Ho who think that the term, um, Subject to the jurisdiction means kind of the ordinary sense of does the federal government have power over you to like punish you for things and this kind of this kind of thing.

And then there was the other view largely associated with John Eastman that says, no, the term subject to the jurisdiction thereof has a more a more limited sense that would not encompass these that also encompass.

You know, there are different versions of it, but ideas about allegiance that one would owe or perhaps domicile and some other things.

Maybe we could actually have a 2028 Donald Trump president." Right? This is just trying to get Trump, Trump's opin- uh, uh, attention.

When, you know, James Ho comes out and undoes what he's written previously about birthright citizenship because that was-

Yeah

...

In an appeal, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit upheld the conviction, but the Full Circuit vacated that opinion and granted an en banc re-hearing, which was scheduled this week.

The per curiam opinion didn't say much, but in Judge James Ho's concurrence, he said, The right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment is a fundamental civil right.

comparable to other provisions of the Bill of Rights, and that the felon gun ban, quote, imposes a lifetime ban on the possession of a firearm, and it does so even if the person has never been sentenced to serve a single day in prison.

Relevant, because Cordova himself never served a single day in prison.

Does the year come out of that?

I think the thing that we've learned about the Federalist Society, I mean, it's now deemed the realm of the squishes under Trump because he wants people like James Ho and Matthew Kazmarek and Aileen Cannon on the Supreme Court, people with only a tenuous grasp of law or constitution or integrity.

But anyway, anyway.

they get wins and they still can recruit because, I mean, and this is the problem with Supreme Court.