I graduated from law school in 1987 and spent my career working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite several years at a couple of prestigious law firms, the fact that I wasn’t on the East Coast meant I didn’t often litigate with or opposite Harvard grads. Thus, my theories about Harvard Law grads are based upon a relatively small sample.

That sample, though, led me to conclude that Harvard law students weren’t getting value for their money. They were dimwitted about how the law works, and many were intellectually corrupt. Barack and Michelle Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all Harvard Law grads, only hardened my perceptions.  Most recently, the opinions that CNN’s Elie Honig and MSNBC’s Elie Mystal gave about Trump v. CASA, Inc. certainly haven’t changed my mind.

Created using a public domain image.

Here’s the thing to understand about CASA: Since the Judiciary Act of 1789, the federal system has worked in a very specific way. Federal district courts would have jurisdiction that extended to the parties before them and to the controversies those parties were litigating.

As to those parties, the district courts would interpret statutory and case authority and apply it to the court’s or a jury’s factual findings. If there were more than one or a handful of plaintiffs, the court could go through a specific process to certify a class action, so that its ruling would extend to all members of that class—a class that might encompass people across America.

And that was it. This is (or at least, used to be) law school 101.

For a district judge’s decision to have national implications, it would have to go through the filter of the Supreme Court. There were two ways to get an issue to the Supreme Court. One was for the Supreme Court to conclude that a single case was of such consequence that it needed the court’s immediate analysis about the issue’s constitutionality. The other way was for the Supreme Court, through specific procedures, to be made aware that different federal appellate jurisdictions were creating markedly different lines of precedence on matters of national consequence, requiring the Supreme Court to clarify a single legal or constitutional principle for the entire federal system. Again, law school 101.

In sum: The system since 1789 (and, I guess 1803’s Marbury v. Madison, which saw the Court take for itself the power to decide constitutional issues) has been that district courts make legal rulings affecting parties in their courtrooms, the appellate courts affirm or deny that a ruling is correct for the district courts in that appellate distrct, and the Supreme Court may ultimately decide a single approach to that issue which is to play out across the land.

And that, of course, is exactly what the Supreme Court affirmed in Trump v. CASA. For all the outrage, the Court simply said that this is how it’s always been done, and was always intended to be done. Basically, the decision was a no-brainer—and every attorney who actually knows the law should agree with that fact.

But Elie Honig and Elie Mystal, both Harvard grads, are having problems. Appearing on CNN, Honig explained that, thanks to the CASA ruling, 22 states are going to have different birthright citizenship laws:

????NEW: Elie Honig STUNS CNN Host Kate Bolduan by explaining possible birthright citizenship scenario after Supreme Court ruling????

HONIG: "There are 22 states that have sued to challenge Trump's effort to limit birthright — it could be that we have different laws in those 22… pic.twitter.com/5DiCW6YXrs

— Jason Cohen ???????? (@JasonJournoDC) June 30, 2025

“We could end up in a scenario—there are 22 states that have sued to challenge Trump’s effort to limit birthright—it could be that we have different laws in those 22 states or different judicial holds,” Honig stated in horror, adding, “we could have a scenario where a child born in New Jersey is a citizen, a child born across the river in Pennsylvania is not a citizen under the exact same circumstances.”

Yes, but so what? As has happened since 1789, the matter will end in the Supreme Court, which will issue a final decision applicable across America. And in fact, this will probably happen in October. This is not a crisis; this is how the system has always worked.

Not to be outdone in the “What the heck is Harvard law teaching” sweepstakes, Elie Mystal created a bizarre “what if” scenario that saw Trump proposing to murder Canadian journalists in America:

Deranged Elie Mystal explains SCOTUS nationwide injunction ruling by describing how Trump could hatch a plot to m*rder people.

“Imagine Donald Trump wants to m*rder you…"

Totally sane, normal stuff going on over there at MSNBC.

Totally sane.

Totally normal. pic.twitter.com/Ql1ZEHq78z

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 28, 2025

Imagine Donald Trump wants to do something illegal to you, Ali Velshi. Imagine that he wants to murder you. Imagine that he and Stephen Miller released an entire policy explaining about how they can murder Canadian journalists who are working in America because they’re taking the jobs from real American journalists. Right. So he’s going to murder you. So you. Ali Velshi, you go to court. You go to court in the Southern District of New York. And you say, like, I don’t, I don’t I don’t think this murder thing is constitutional. It’s clearly illegal. It’s clearly constitutional. Donald Trump and Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller shouldn’t be able to have a plan to murder me. And the court says, you’re right, Ali Velshi. There’s no way Donald Trump is allowed to murder you. We’re going to have an injunction. We’re going to stay the executive order saying that he’s going to murder Canadian journalists who are working in America because they’re taking the jobs from real American journalists.

Again, no. Just no. First, murder is illegal. The president may interpret the law to shape his policies, but there is no circumstance in which he can commit blatantly criminal acts. In other words, this example is so irrational that it makes no sense.

Second, as the Supreme Court carefully pointed out in CASA, if a situation applies to a class of people, then those people can use a defined process asking a court to certify a class action. The court’s ruling then applies to all members of that class, something that’s been the case since 1820, when the federal court system first implemented class actions. Moreover, given that murder cannot be undone, any district or appellate court in which the class appears will stay the murder order pending a Supreme Court ruling.

When you see rank and file Democrats panic about what the Supreme Court has done in CASA, you need to understand that this panic comes from the top—and that Harvard Law School graduates are amongst the most aggressive in pushing misinformation and outright propaganda to keep the panic alive.