Washington Summary Judgment

November 13, 2019

In State of Washington v. Dep’t of State et al., No. C18-1115-RSL (W.D. Wash), Judge Lasnik decided he had the power to vacate our license from the State Department. The rest of his order blandly accepts the Plaintiff States’ basic position and either skips past our arguments entirely or addresses them with conclusory denials.  We have come to expect this kind of laziness and basic error from district judges.

The good news is the appeal window to the Ninth Circuit opens soon. The standard of review is de novo, so such a one-sided and obviously wrong order should be easy enough to reverse. The Feds likely don’t want such an order to stand, but I won’t argue for them here.

I won’t share our overall appellate strategy in these blog posts, but no one is going to be interested in Lasnik and the Seattle action in the next stage of this controversy. Our focus will remain on New Jersey, and soon you’ll see why.