Judge Dismisses Attorney’s Case Challenging Court’s Gag Order Rule; Attorney Will Appeal Decision

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—On Tuesday, Senior Circuit Judge Julia Gibbons of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who was specially assigned to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Nashville-based civil rights attorney, challenging the constitutionality of a local court rule that allows judges to ban attorneys from discussing their cases with media and the public. Daniel Horwitz and his attorneys from the Institute for Justice (IJ) will appeal this dismissal to the full Sixth Circuit. 

“People deserve to know what the government and its contractors are doing, and silencing attorneys like me from discussing our cases prevents the public from getting this important information of public concern,” said Daniel. “I will continue to fight for my right to discuss my cases and the public’s right to hear about them.” 

In July 2022, a federal magistrate from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee used that court’s local rule to impose a gag order on Daniel, preventing him from discussing a wrongful death case he brought against a private prison with the media. Since that time, Daniel has filed seven more lawsuits against CoreCivic, the private prison company. He has repeatedly asked the court in those cases to uphold his right to discuss these cases with the public, but the cases have all either settled or been transferred to other courts before he could get a final ruling on his constitutional challenge. So, in October 2024, Daniel and IJ filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and its four district judges. 

In Tuesday’s ruling, Judge Gibbons rejected the district judges’ claim that they could not be sued due to “sovereign immunity,” a doctrine that prevents the government from being sued without its consent. (However, she did agree that the district court itself was entitled to sovereign immunity.) But Judge Gibbons ruled on her own initiative that Daniel did not have standing to sue the judges—the harms imposed by the local rule were “hypothetical,” she reasoned, because he did not allege that he planned to violate the rule and there was no active enforcement proceeding. 

“Daniel does not have to break the law before he gets standing to vindicate his First Amendment rights,” said IJ Attorney Jared McClain. “This gag-order rule has been enforced against Daniel in the past, he is still bound by it, and the court threatened him with contempt if he violates it again. There shouldn’t be any question that the threat of enforcement has chilled Daniel’s speech. He has had to turn down interviews about his cases as recently as last month.”