This is rather sweet.
Endowed Dimwit writes an over-the-top piece on a rather esoteric bit of Federal Indian Law -- the authority of the District Court over the evidence in the Cobell v. Norton Individual Indian Trust case, a case that has an evidence issue 100 years long and a scope of over 500,000 individual trusts, and which has been going on for 8 years.
Endowed Dimwit effortlessly takes the paper hair of Judge Royce C. Lamberth, under the title "Judge Lamberth's Reign of Terror at the Department of Interior", all this in the general climate of microcephaly that trumpets the evils of "activist judges" and turns a willfully blind eye to the record of Bill Rehnquist, easily the most activist judge to sit on a Federal Indian Law case since Edward Teach lay the Queen Ann's Revenge at Okerecock Inlet and raided the sailings out of Charleston and the Bahamas and squired about with the planters of the Carolinas. Our hero, the Right Honorable Endowed Dimwit did allow as how he couldn't tell a hawk from a handsaw when it comes to Federal Indian Law, but that didn't matter because ... he said so. The core of the issue was the district court's abuse of discretion to ... talk down to the Secretary of the Interior.
This can't get much better.
Today a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals in Washington ruled decisively that U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth did not exceed his authority in issuing injunctions for securing the computer data in the historic Cobell v. Norton Individual Indian Trust case.
The Appeals Court went further, explicitly affirming the district court's discretion to fashion broad remedies in resolving the largest lawsuit ever filed against the United States government.
The Court of Appeals also held that the district court retains substantial authority to fashion an equitable remedy because the underlying lawsuit is both an Indian case and a trust case in which the trustees have egregiously breached their fiduciary duties.
My thanks to Nicholas Sarwark for his blog.
Note to Dickie Pierce. F. Return toupee soonest.
Posted by EBW at December 3, 2004 07:22 PM | TrackBack