1939—Two weeks after President Roosevelt nominates SEC chairman (and former Yale law professor) William O. Douglas to the Supreme Court, the Senate confirms the nomination by a 62-4 vote. On the Court from 1939 until 1975, Douglas will become the longest-misserving justice in history.
2017—“The goalposts have been moving over the years,” asserts the en banc Seventh Circuit majority in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College. Overriding its own precedent and contradicting nine other circuits, the majority holds that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII.
In a separate concurring opinion, Judge Richard A. Posner, advocating a “form of [statutory] interpretation” that he labels “judicial interpretive updating,” states that he “would prefer to see us acknowledge openly that today we, who are judges rather than members of Congress, are imposing on a half-century-old statute a meaning of ‘sex discrimination’ that the Congress that enacted it would not have accepted.”
In her dissent, Judge Diane S. Sykes, joined by two colleagues, explains that “we do not sit as a common-law court free to engage in ‘judicial interpretive updating,’ as Judge Posner calls it, or to do the same thing by pressing hard on tenuously related Supreme Court opinions, as the majority does.”