Ninth Circuit Judge Gabriel Sanchez spent his first years out of college studying presidential politics in Argentina. After law school, while working for a big firm, he won an award from the ACLU. Later, as California Gov. Jerry Brown’s top legal adviser, he oversaw the litigation that found overcrowding in California’s prisons to violate the Eighth Amendment because they constituted “cruel and unusual” punishment, a novel legal argument that, while upheld by the Supreme Court (in a 5-4 vote), drew sharp criticism from the court’s conservatives, including Antonin Scalia, who called it “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation’s history.”
Given that record, one would imagine Judge Sanchez considers himself a liberal who looks to liberal icons like William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall for guidance.
He’s not, at least not based on my experience with him last week.
Our exchange came in the case Kennedy v. Google that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed against Google to prevent the tech giant from censoring him on YouTube during his presidential campaign. (I am the lawyer leading that case.) YouTube took down two of his videos questioning the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines and pandemic lockdowns, stating it was medical misinformation.
The case is like Murthy v. Missouri, which was argued at the Supreme Court in March. But it’s not identical. Among other things, we argue that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act made large internet-based platforms like Google and YouTube public forums, where viewpoint discrimination
