You ready?

I was born ready.

Welcome back to advisory opinions. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by special guest David French.

David are you recovering from our marathon special Stanford Law School and Crisis episode?

Yeah, it took me two full days, but I've now fully recovered. I'm ready.

Rested.

How long today? Are we three hours today?

Yeah, we'll see how it goes.

Because we actually, we have a really nice lineup, I think.

So we're going to start with something called the Biden report, which the vast majority of you have never heard of.

But for all of our district judges out there, y'all know what we're talking about.

We'll do a little recap on Stanford, some latest updates, some questions that we got in the comments section that I think were worth answering.

And then finally, Rahimi revisited a new opinion out from the fifth circuit and especially judge hose concurrence that I said, I don't know, I'm starting to be a little persuaded.

So we'll talk about that. And finally, speaking of academic freedom and free speech and the whole ball of wax, we're going to finish with some Amy wax over at the University of Pennsylvania.

All right, David. So every March 31st and September 30th, but we're going to talk mostly about the impending March 31st deadline.

Federal district court judges are subject to a soft deadline known as the six month list, also called the Biden report.

And basically, this is every judges backlog. So cases older than three years and maybe most importantly, motions pending more than six months.

And that list is made public twice a year March 31st being the deadline that's coming first.

Now, obviously judges have life tenure. You can't touch them. So it's not like this list has any actual punitive value, but it's sort of like a public name and shame, if you will, that Congress instituted to try to like get these judges moving along totally understand the reason for doing it.

But as I heard from one such district judge out there, the incentives can actually create kind of a provision, if you will, because look, a few things.

One, the motions that would be on that six month list, then get sort of a speed it up treatment errors are much more likely on that on those that would otherwise have made the list because they're just sort of put out there.

And I'm just going to be interesting. I'd love to see someone do the data analysis on the likelihood of a motion being overturned at the circuit level and whether that likelihood goes up if the motion was released close to either of these six month deadlines.

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