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I was born ready.

Welcome to advisory opinions. I'm Sarah Isger. That's David French and David. It's not slowing down. It's not June, man. What? This is April. I thought we could like ease into June.

We're going to talk about the dueling abortion rulings in Texas and Washington state. Yes, we will talk about the Clarence Thomas Pro-Publica article.

And then we've got sort of a transgender basket. The Supreme Court rejects a case about sports. The Biden administration releases a proposed rulemaking.

And then we have a pronoun case as well. And finally, Governor Greg Abbott talking about pardoning a guy in Texas related to standard ground laws that obviously David will have thoughts on.

Indeed.

All right, David. Let's start with the dueling abortion rulings. Do you want to set this up a little bit?

Yeah. So what we have are this is a situation that I don't think we really maybe even in all our discussions of in all our discussions of nationwide injunctions.

I'm not saying that we haven't really set up well, but in hindsight seems really obvious. And that is what do you do if one court and one jurisdiction says stop.

And another court and another jurisdiction says go. So it's really relatively rare. You know, when all this talk about nationwide injunctions.

It hasn't happened much before. There's like one or two around, for instance, DACA or Obamacare where you can sort of find them. And even here, I think that the better argument is that these are in direct conflict with each other.

But even here, there's an argument that there's not at least because one of them, the Texas one is about the 2020 sorry 2000 approval of Miffa Preston, the RU486 abortion drug that you might have heard about.

And the other one is about the 2023 restrictions. And so in theory, if you get rid of the 2000 approval, the 2023 restrictions are meaningless. On the other hand, the injunction in the 2023 restriction case said that the FDA was required to maintain the status quo. And so that's where the dueling this comes from.

Yes. So what we basically have is a lawsuit against the FDA approval of the drug, one of the two drugs, the first drug and the two drug cocktail that is typically used for medical abortions. And so essentially what you're doing is you're the plaintiffs are doing is saying this this 2000 approval is was unlawful, was improper. And they're challenging this in court.

Now what's interesting about this or a number of things beyond the merits of the case, the merits are the least interesting part in terms of like how this is going to get resolved. It ain't going to be on the merits. And if you're wondering how we're now litigating a 2000 approval, like the year 2000, like why 2k.

You're right. That's weird.

Yeah. Yeah. So we got a lot here to talk about that is has nothing to do has nothing at all to do with whether the FDA properly approved the drug.

So one of the questions is standing. So these are these are doctors who are claiming in essence that they have standing because other doctors may prescribe the drug the drug the the the the doctors who are raising this lawsuit are essentially saying other doctors could pursue the drug.

Other doctors could prescribe the drug the drug has problems which should have required FDA not to approve it. Those problems have spillover effects, including patients going into the hospital patients being sent to them, for example, for further treatment, etc. So that's going to give them standing there.

The standing is derived from the secondary effects of the bad effects of the medicine. Then you have a statute of limitations issue. Now there is a 2000 approval administrative challenge to that approval that I don't believe was resolved into until 2016 very long administrative process.

But loss it on that 2000 approval that was challenged and the challenge wasn't resolved until 2016 should have been brought months earlier in 2022, even though in plaintiffs say, well, wait a minute, this was essentially reset the 2000 approval was reset by a much later, I believe 2016 expansion and revision of the terms of the approval of the medication.

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