Stephen Reinhardt

American judge

Stephen Roy Reinhardt (born Stephen Roy Shapiro; March 27, 1931 – March 29, 2018) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with chambers in Los Angeles, California. He was the last federal appeals court judge in active service to have been appointed to his position by President Jimmy Carter.

Reinhardt was born Stephen Roy Shapiro into a Jewish family in New York City, to lawyer Samuel Shapiro, and Silvia Handelsman. Reinhardt changed his name after his mother divorced his father and married film director and producer Gottfried Reinhardt. After law school, Reinhardt worked at the legal counsel's office for the United States Air Force as a lieutenant in Washington, D. C. Two years later, he clerked for United States District Judge Luther Youngdahl, a former governor of Minnesota, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He then entered private practice, working for the law firm O'Melveny & Myers from 1958 to 1959 practicing entertainment law. After two years at O'Melveny, he began working at a small firm in Los Angeles that became Fogel, Julber, Reinhardt, Rothschild & Feldman, specializing in labor law.

Reinhardt was involved in a controversy after he died. Eleven judges of the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument in the case of Yovino v. Rizo. Reinhardt wrote an opinion on behalf of himself and five other judges, which was issued by the court 11 days after he died. A footnote at the beginning of the opinion stated: “Prior to his death, Judge Reinhardt fully participated in this case and authored this opinion. The majority opinion and all concurrences were final, and voting was completed by the en banc court prior to his death.”

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which vacated Reinhardt's opinion. The Supreme Court stated:

<blockquote>As for judicial practice, we are not aware of any rule or decision of the Ninth Circuit that renders judges’ votes and opinions immutable at some point in time prior to their public release. And it is generally understood that a judge may change his or her position up to the very moment when a decision is released. . Because Judge Reinhardt was no longer a judge at the time when the en banc decision in this case was filed, the Ninth Circuit erred in counting him as a member of the majority. That practice effectively allowed a deceased judge to exercise the judicial power of the United States after his death. But federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity. In 2020, after Judge Reinhardt's death, a staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, North Carolina testified before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet that Judge Reinhardt had sexually harassed her while she worked for him as a law clerk; her testimony described her efforts to report the harassment.