Judicial Watch reports that the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, is an officer and trustee of a group that funds the American Civil Liberties Union's Michigan branch - which was a plaintiff in the case.

Indeed, the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan's board of trustees, which includes Judge Taylor, makes all funding decisions for the group - and has given the local ACLU at least $125,000 since 1999.

Legal-ethics experts disagree on whether the judge (a Jimmy Carter appointee, natch) should have recused herself from hearing the case. But they concur that she should have at least disclosed the relationship.

So what was she trying to hide?

And that's not the only thing on which legal experts appear to agree.

As The New York Times reported last weekend, there is near-unanimity in the legal world - including those who believe the surveillance program to be illegal - that Judge Taylor's ruling was not just weak, but legally shoddy.

The ruling "was meant for headlines," wrote Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department official who agrees with the result.

Another, Pennsylvania lawyer and legal-industry blogger Howard Bashman, frankly stated that it "is not strongly grounded in legal authority."

The Times found experts in accord that Taylor's ruling "overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government's major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusion."

Orin Kerr, a law professor a George Washington University, complained that the decision contains "general ruminations, much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect."

As John Schmidt, a Clinton administration official who defends the program, told The Times: "It's hard to exaggerate how bad [the ruling] is."

In fact, some speculated that Judge Taylor moved too quickly to issue her decision - perhaps to prevent all the lawsuits on this case from being consolidated, taking this one out of her hands.

And, of course, to make herself a certified hero of the left.

That she most certainly did.

How else to explain such overheated rhetoric as: "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution"? Such language surely had them clinking champagne glasses at one of George Soros' townhouses.

But as Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, noted in a Times op-ed, the most quoted sentence of the judge's decision is simply wrong.

Apart from the fact that hereditary kings have very little power these days, President Bush is not claiming to be above the law, she writes. On the contrary, "he's making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law."

Indeed, Anna Diggs Taylor has done little more than provide ammunition for those who argue that politically biased judicial activists are more intent on legislating from the bench than on actually interpreting the law.

That's why Judge Taylor's newfound fans won't be cheering once the U.S. Court of Appeals deservedly makes short shrift of her transparently partisan ruling.

Which should happen shortly. Source.