Washington Post reported today that Texas federal district court judge Matthew Kacsmaryk who issued last week's controversial opinion finding the FDA's approval of the abortion medication mifepristone invalid removed his name as author of a pending law review article as his nomination to the federal bench became imminent. According to the Post:
As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions.
The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”
But a few months after the piece arrived, an editor at the law journal ... received an unusual email: ... Kacsmaryk, who had originally been listed as the article’s sole author, said he would be removing his name and replacing it with those of two colleagues at his legal group, First Liberty Institute....
The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed, nor did he list the article on the paperwork he submitted to the Senate in advance of confirmation hearings....
A spokesman for First Liberty ... said that Kacsmaryk’s name had been a “placeholder” on the article and that Kacsmaryk had not provided a “substantive contribution.”....
The full Post article has additional details.
