✏️ Legal Pad
Pour Now, Argue Later
The federal government is building a 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom where the White House East Wing used to stand. Two federal courts have ruled the project probably illegal: federal law requires express congressional approval before any “building or structure” goes up on federal grounds in the District, and Congress never approved this one. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon enjoined construction; the D.C. Circuit affirmed, 2-1.
The administration’s response was not “the lower courts got it wrong.” It was “you’re too late.” Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices the “concrete-and-steel superstructure,” with its “hardened concrete,” “missile-resistant columns,” and “blast-proof glass,” is so far along that stopping it is “practically impossible.” A 250-person crew is working twenty hours a day, seven days a week. The project is two-thirds done. Scheduled completion: September 2028.
Read those two sentences together. Nothing about a 2028 ribbon-cutting requires pouring concrete around the clock in 2026 except the litigation. Every truckload is an argument. Northwestern’s James Pfander calls it the “first-mover advantage”: move fast, then tell the court it is too late. The National Trust for Historic Preservation put it more bluntly: “The solution is not to allow Petitioners to illegally complete the entire ballroom just because they illegally commenced it.” On August 21, Chief Justice Roberts issued a one-sentence administrative stay, which means the mixers keep turning.
Closer to Home: equity’s oldest job is holding things still long enough for the court’s answer to matter. That’s the point of a preliminary injunction, in Washington or in Greenville. The same instinct shows up at our scale: the staircase rebuilt the week after the fall, the surveillance video that “writes over itself” just before the preservation letter arrives. Both Carolinas give judges real tools, from injunctions to spoliation sanctions to adverse inferences, because when a party changes the very thing a court is about to rule on, the answer is not supposed to be “well, what’s done is done.”
💡 Sidebar
Lawyer Tip No. 314: “It Depends” Is Literally the Answer to Every Question You Ask a Lawyer
Ask a surgeon if the leg is broken and you get a yes or a no. Ask a lawyer if you have a case and you get the profession’s official motto: it depends.
It sounds like a meter running, but it is the most honest sentence in the building. Law is rules applied to facts, and I don’t have your facts yet. In my world, facts are also decided by the jury, and I’ll be the first to tell you I have no clue what 12 people in a box will do. Any lawyer that says otherwise has never tried a case. Whether the fall is a case depends on where the water came from and how long it sat there. Whether the wreck is a good case depends on coverage nobody has looked up yet. Change one fact and the answer flips.
So here is the tip: don’t judge a lawyer for saying “it depends.” Judge the next sentence. A good lawyer tells you what it depends on and starts digging for those facts. The one who answers instantly, with total certainty, has either handled a thousand cases just like yours or hasn’t thought about yours at all. Which one is it? It depends.
⚖️ Closing Arguments
A Word for the Delivery Room’s Unsung Hero
Our son is due next Friday, September 4, meaning by the next edition I may be a father of two. So it is high time somebody had the courage to say what polite society will not: in the whole miracle of childbirth, it is the men who do the truly hard work.
Consider the evidence. Ashley has merely had to grow an entire human being from scratch for nine months. She has endured the heartburn, the summer heat, the sleepless nights, and what may be a small elbow or knee permanently lodged beneath her rib cage. I, meanwhile, have been forced to retrieve snacks from rooms I was not already standing in. On one occasion, I had already sat down.
Everyone talks about how difficult labor is on the mother. Nobody talks about the husband standing beside the bed being subjected to an insurmountable amount of boredom. Here I am, a trial attorney used to the lights and pressures of the arena, reduced in the most consequential moment of my life to repeating the phrase, “You’re doing great!” every four minutes and trying to avoid eye contact. There is no CLE for this and, importantly, there is no associate to stand in for me.
And then, when the ordeal is finally over, the father alone must confront the car seat, a contraption apparently designed by NASA engineers who were told halfway through the project that children would be involved. It has straps, anchors, clips, warning labels, and an instruction manual written in the same tone as a nuclear reactor startup procedure. The baby may have just entered the world, but Dad is outside in the parking garage watching a YouTube video entitled “How to Install Nuna Car Seat EASY!!!” while sweating through his shirt. This is sacrifice.
Let the record reflect that the foregoing is tongue-in-cheek, and the undersigned expects the argument to be received the way most of his arguments are: overruled, swiftly and correctly.
The truth is that Ashley has done every ounce of the real work for nine months, and next Friday she will somehow do even more. My contribution will consist primarily of showing up, staying out of the way when instructed, and not saying anything stupid. Our daughter is about to be promoted to big sister, a title she will undoubtedly exercise with more authority and less tolerance for dissent than most judges.
And if next week’s edition arrives late, short, incoherent, or riddled with typos, please understand that it was written one-handed at 3:00 a.m. by a really happy guy who has not slept, cannot remember what day it is, and has somehow already been informed that he is washing the bottles wrong. Court is in recess- see you next Friday.
