… and that Twitter was a state supreme court. Actually, it is (remotely) possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon address the First Amendment constitutionality of these types of state supreme court restrictions on lawyers’ speech about, well, the state supreme court members and other judges.

The first of the two links above links to what is known as a “petition for en banc rehearing” in a case called Fieger v. The Michigan Supreme Court—a case in which prominent Michigan attorney Geoffrey Fieger filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of Michigan’s attorney-censorship-of-speech-­about-judges rules.

Rules of this sort, by the way, are, conveniently for judges, not legislative acts enacted by the state legislature after public debate but instead simply decrees issued by—you guessed it—state supreme court judges. (The second link links to an article about a case out of Florida.)

Anyway, after the federal appellate court for the Sixth Circuit—the federal appellate court for Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee—denied Fieger’s petition for rehearing, he filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court asking that that Court agree to hear the case.

Surprisingly (because the Supreme Court almost never pays attention to cases that have received no national publicity unless it is some rightwing or business interest that is asking the Court to hear the case and, if the latter, a Washington-based lawyer who is a “regular” in that court is representing the petitioner), one of the justices last month had the Court issue an order requesting a response from the Michigan Supreme Court.

This means that at least one justice plans to try to persuade at least three others to vote to hear the case—which raises the chance that the Court will do so from virtually zero to roughly five percent, by my calculation, based on what I’ve been told.

Still, hope springs eternal ….