Ohio boasts a wild season of Supreme Court races, with six competitors vying for three slots and the potential to flip the philosophical lean of the bench. One race features two incumbents squaring off with Justice Melody Stewart defending her seat against Justice Joe Deters who is running for Stewart’s seat because it carries a full term as opposed to his current appointed seat.
If the name “Joe Deters” sounds familiar, it’s because back in July he wrote one of the most hilariously nonsensical exercises in intellectually bankrupt “textualism” ever committed to print. An opinion that Justice Stewart — who dissented in the relevant decision — wants the voters to understand when they go to the ballot box:
Yeah, doesn’t make any sense to me, either. My opponent contorts the plain meaning of a simple word. I wonder why? pic.twitter.com/ubjK6iTXSl
— Melody Stewart for Ohio Supreme Court (@Stewart4OhioSC) October 11, 2024
For those who don’t remember, this case involved a restaurant patron choking on a 1-3/8 inch chicken bone cooked inside a “boneless” wing. This might seem a straightforward failure on the part of the restaurant’s duty to “not choke customers,” and yet Justice Deters and his Republican colleagues on the Ohio Supreme Court pulled the eatery out of the fryer so to speak by declaring the plain text of “boneless” to mean… well, “not boneless.”
And regarding the food item’s being called a “boneless wing,” it is common sense that that label was merely a description of the cooking style. A diner reading “boneless wings” on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating “chicken fingers” would know that he had not been served fingers. The food item’s label on the menu described a cooking style; it was not a guarantee.
“Boneless” is not so much a cooking style on par with terms like “baked” or “braised” if one considered the plain meaning of that text amongst the rest of us burdened by a basic grasp of the English fucking language. But, unmoored by the vagaries of usage, Deters found an opening to channel his inner Lewis Carroll and just make up a frabjous new “boneless” that means “having giant ass bones in it.”
Which is all to say Ohioans have a pretty clear choice in November. You can stack the Supreme Court with ding dongs who don’t know what the word “boneless” means, or you can vote for Stewart and the Democrats.
Earlier: ‘Boneless’ Wings Can Have Bones, Declare Committed Textualists
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.