Free Republic

"Companies were seized, assets were frozen and lives were upended" as a result of misconduct by prosecutors for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge said while dismissing a civil fraud case against Utah cryptocurrency brokers and awarding the brokers $1.8 million in attorney fees. U.S. Chief District Judge Robert Shelby upbraided the commission, saying it recklessly used "layers of false statements" in a "gross abuse of power," saying their misrepresentations were "deeply troubling" and undermined the integrity of the judicial process, before dismissing its case May 28 and ordering payment of fees that will ultimately be financed...

Liberal federal judges who have ruled against state laws barring same-sex “marriages,” essentially arguing that there is no biological evidence to support the idea of marriage between a man and a woman, “need some basic plumbing lessons,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), himself a former state district judge for Texas’s 7th judicial district and chief justice of Texas’s 12th Court of Appeals. […] In the Oklahoma case on Jan. 14, U.S. District Judge Terence C. Kern ruled that “Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.” (Kern was nominated to his...

An Obama appointee to the federal bench ruled Friday that the right to same-sex marriage is “deeply rooted in the nation’s history and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” and as such is a fundamental right. Judge Robert J. Shelby was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Central Division of Utah in 2012 by President Obama, then confirmed by a Senate voice vote on Sept. 21, 2012, with neither debate nor objection, according to CNS News. A federal district court is a court of original jurisdiction, but if its opinions are left unchallenged, they become the law...