Massachusetts judge apologizes to conservative justices on Supreme Court

WASHINGTON — Nearly two weeks after two Supreme Court justices delivered a stinging rebuke warning lower-court judges not to “defy” their rulings, the judge at whom the directive was aimed issued an apology from the bench, pledging to adjust to meet the highest court’s demands.

The acknowledgment Tuesday by Judge William G. Young in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts highlighted the precarious position that lower courts have landed in this year as they struggle to make sense of a growing number of unsigned orders the Supreme Court has produced through the court’s emergency docket.

Young’s apology came at a hearing Tuesday to discuss how to move forward after the Supreme Court in August overruled his decision to block the Trump administration from slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health.

Writing as part of that emergency order, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh had suggested that Young subverted the court’s will by failing to apply an earlier emergency order focused on canceled Education Department grants to his NIH case.

Young said Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices