Can someone check in on Judge Wilkinson? Because the conservative legal movement luminary appears to be having a moment.
Wrapping up a routine insurance opinion by musing, “What after all does it matter?” the Fourth Circuit veteran took Owners Ins. Co. v. Walsh on a three-paragraph journey into a dorm-room philosophy session gone rogue. Deciding a dispute about whether a man fatally struck by a car while on his riding mower could tap uninsured motorist coverage after exhausting the driver’s policy limit, Judge Wilkinson channeled Carl Sagan in full 1970s turtleneck mode:
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A case but a speck in the recesses of interstellar space and in the four-plus billion years since our solar system’s birth.
Buddy. It’s a South Carolina insurance dispute, not the Voyager Golden Record.
Just kick back, turn on the black light, and crank up Dust in the Wind.
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To be fair, Judge Wilkinson has shared some THOUGHTS about the rule of law lately. We’re mere days removed from Wilkinson dropping a blistering opinion in the Abrego Garcia case laying out the stakes involved in the Trump administration’s new “Disappearances R’ Us” strategy for an actually principled conservative:
The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
Perhaps standing at the edge of legal authoritarianism and staring into that void has left him pondering life, death, and 14-point Times New Roman.
Which brings us to this latest opinion, in which he contemplates the mortality of man, the meaning of justice, and then affirms the district court’s ruling that the insurer owes nothing more under the contract.
To be human is to live in the here and now. This small case extracts courageous meaning from the vast impersonality in which it resides. Its immediacy confounds infinity; its passions light the dark.
Somewhere a law school gunner just got that tattooed on their chest. And then got renditioned to El Salvador.
Behind all the planetary metaphors and meditations on cosmic dust, Wilkinson seems to be asking — maybe himself, maybe the universe — “Is this enough?”
What does it matter, this case deserted by both space and time?
Are you there God? It’s me, Harvie.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.