right

Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker whose documentaries shined a light on society’s underdogs and inspired social change, has died. He was 65.

Lindstrom’s wife, author Cheryl Strayed, confirmed the news on Instagram Friday.

“Brian Lindstrom died this morning the way he lived — with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life,” she wrote. “Our children, Carver and Bobbi, and I held him as he took his last breath and we will hold him forever in our hearts. The only thing more immense than our sorrow that Progressive Supranuclear Palsy took our beloved Brian from us is the endless love we have for him.”

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, PSP is caused by damage to nerve cells in areas of the brain that control thinking and body movements. The rare neurological disease progresses rapidly.

Strayed, who penned the bestselling memoir “Wild,” which was later adapted for the big screen and starred Reese Witherspoon, announced just weeks ago that Lindstrom had been diagnosed “with a serious, fatal illness.”

Lindstrom was born Feb. 12, 1961. The son of a bartender and a liquor salesman, he was raised in Portland, Ore. — which he and his family still called home.

He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he paid for by taking out student loans, landing work-study jobs and working summers in a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska. During a 2013 TEDx Talk, Lindstrom said that after he’d exhausted all the video production classes at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, his professor Stuart Kaplan gave him a gift certificate to a class at the Northwest Film Center. There, Lindstrom made a short film about his grandpa that landed him a spot in the MFA program at Columbia University.

It was a train trip with his grandpa that inspired Lindstrom to tackle challenging topics with a lens that restored dignity to his subjects. His grandpa was a binge-drinker, and on day three of the trip, he woke up with a hangover and was missing his dentures. Lindstrom, only 5 at the time, noticed the way other passengers treated him and his grandpa differently.

“I think what my films are about is that search for my grandfather’s dentures, the humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between us and them and arrives at we,” he said.

Lindstrom said he returned to Portland after film school and “did several projects with the Northwest Film Center that had me putting a camera in the hands of kids on probation, homeless teens, newly recovering addicts, hard-hit people who had hard-hitting stories to share.”

“Those projects taught me so much about the transformative power of art, and they gave me permission I felt in my personal films to ask people if I might follow them, so that an audience could better understand what they were going through, and by extension, better understand themselves,” he said.

Lindstrom’s 2007 award-winning cinéma-vérité-style film, “Finding Normal,” followed long-term drug addicts as they left prison or detox and tried to rebuild their lives with the help of a recovery mentor.

“What I’m most proud about is that ‘Finding Normal’ is the only film to ever be shown to inmates in solitary confinement at Oregon State Penitentiary, and not, I might add, as a punishment,” Lindstrom said.

In 2013, he released “Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse,” a documentary that illuminated the life of a man who grappled with schizophrenia and examined his death, which happened in police custody. Discussing the film with LA Progressive in 2018, Lindstrom said that he doesn’t make films for audiences.

“I make them for the people in the film. It is my small way of honoring them,” he told the outlet. “That doesn’t mean I don’t delve into dark areas or that I ignore that person’s struggles. I’m much more concerned with trying to achieve an honest depiction of that person’s life than I am with any potential audience reaction.”

Lindstrom’s work aimed to inspire empathy and humanize those suffering in the margins of society, but it also catalyzed policy change. His acclaimed 2015 documentary, “Mothering Inside,” followed participants in the Family Preservation Project (FPP), an initiative helping incarnated moms establish and maintain bonds with their children.

Midway through filming the documentary, the Oregon Department of Corrections announced it planned to nix funding for the FPP. Lindstrom hosted early screenings of the film, which inspired grassroots advocacy that reached then-Gov. Kate Brown, who subsequently signed legislation that restored funding. The film’s release also helped make Oregon the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents.

Partnering with Strayed, Lindstrom made the documentary short, “I Am Not Untouchable. I Just Have My Period,” for the New York Times in 2019. The film highlighted the experience of teen girls in Surkhet, Nepal, and the menstrual stigma they faced. Most recently, the filmmaker released, “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill,” which examined the folk-rock singer’s life from her traumatic childhood and drug-addled adolescence through her rise in the Laurel Canyon music scene and untimely death.

Lindstrom, discussing “Judee Sill” and his style as a filmmaker, told Oregon ArtsWatch, “It’s the chance to kind of focus on the question: What does it mean to be human? The person that the film is about, what can they teach us, what can we learn from them? What can they learn from themselves?”

In 2017, Lindstrom received the Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon for his work advancing civil rights and liberties. That same year, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Lewis & Clark College.

In Strayed’s post announcing Lindstrom’s death, she described their more than 30-year partnership as a stroke of “tremendous luck.”

“We loved each other and our kids with deep devotion and true delight. He was a stellar husband. He was the most magnificent dad. He was a man whose every word and deed was driven by kindness, compassion, and generosity,” she wrote. “He saw the goodness in everyone. He believed that we are all sacred and redeemable.

“His work as a documentary filmmaker was dedicated to telling stories of people who, as he put it, ‘society puts an X through.’ He erased that X with his camera and his astonishing heart.”

Strayed’s memoir — which followed her as she hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of her mother’s death, a battle with drug addiction and divorce from her first husband — concludes with a happy ending. She finished the months-long hike and sat on a white bench near the Bridge of the Gods, a stone’s throw from the spot where, she writes, she’d marry Lindstrom four years later.

“His greatest legacy is Carver and Bobbi, who embody everything good and true about their father. Their extraordinary grace, courage, and fortitude during this harrowing time was unfaltering and grounded in the undying love Brian poured into them every day of their lives,” she wrote. “We do not know how we will live without him. We’re utterly bereft. We can only walk this dark path and search for the beauty Brian knew was there. It will be his eternal light that guides us.”

Netflix picked up the rights to three more NFL contests amid government scrutiny over the migration of games from free TV to streaming.

The NFL’s first-ever regular season game in Melbourne, featuring the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers, will stream Sept. 10 on Netflix, the company announced Wednesday at its upfront presentation in New York. Netflix will present another NFL game first on Nov. 25 with a Thanksgiving eve game between the Rams and the Green Bay Packers at SoFi Stadium.

The streamer is also picking up a Saturday game in the final week of the regular season. With the Christmas double header Netflix has carried since 2024, the additions bring the total to five games next season.

The five games were a part of ESPN’s NFL package. ESPN relinquished the rights after the league took a 10% stake in the Walt Disney Co.-owned entity.

It was widely believed throughout the sports media business that all five games would go to streamers, split between Netflix and YouTube. But the other two will go to Fox, an international game that will air in the morning in the U.S., and NBC.

The two additional games are going to its traditional TV partners after politicians in Washington, including President Trump, raised concerns about the number of NFL contests that are moving off broadcast and behind streaming paywalls.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Fox Corp. Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch visited Trump at the White House in February to warn how traditional TV networks could be priced out of the NFL due to competition from deep-pocketed streamers.

The Department of Justice has also inquired about whether the NFL is violating the antitrust status given to leagues when their teams collectively negotiate TV rights deals.

An NFL executive familiar with the deal who was not authorized to comment publicly said the added broadcast games are not related to the issues raised in Washington. “We always are looking for ways to increase reach at the benefit of our fans,” the executive said.

In recent years, the NFL has carved out a number of games from the broadcast packages to sell to Netflix and YouTube. Those games primarily come out of the regional Sunday afternoon games carried on Fox and CBS.

But the NFL makes the case that it offers 87% of its games on free over-the-air television than any other major sport. Games sold to streamers are still made available on the local TV stations in the local markets of the teams that are featured.

Questioned about his father’s meeting at the White House, Fox Corp. Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch told Wall Street analysts on Monday there is no tension between the league and his company, which has carried the NFL since 1994.

Murdoch also said there have been no new negotiations with the NFL, which has expressed a desire to redo its current media rights package that runs through the 2032-33 season but has an opt-out in 2030. Murdoch has previously said the company is paying fair market value in its current deal.

In addition to the international game in Week 10, Fox is getting an extra Saturday game in Week 15.

The NFL believes its product is undervalued in light of the massive $76-billion, 11-year contract the NBA entered with NBC, Amazon and ESPN last year. The NFL is in the middle of an 11-year deal that pays the league $110 billion for games that provide much higher ratings.

The league has also said the move to streaming in recent years — which includes putting the Thursday Night Football package on Amazon Prime Video — is necessary to reach younger viewers who are not watching traditional TV. The Thursday games are made available on free TV in the local markets of the teams featured.

The NFL does have the right to renegotiate with CBS before that opt-out due to the network’s transfer of ownership. CBS parent Paramount was acquired by Skydance Media last year.

The NFL and CBS are not close on the new deal. The league is looking to increase the network’s fee from $2.1 billion a year to $3 billion, according to people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to comment.

The NFL is currently a break-even proposition for CBS at the current price.

But the NFL is at a significant advantage as the broadcast networks and their affiliated stations are dependent on the league, which provides a vast majority of the highest-rated programming on TV. NFL games give major leverage to TV station groups when they are negotiating new carriage deals from cable and satellite providers.

¿Qué en la fregada?

What the hell?

That’s what I muttered after learning that Los Angeles Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez wants to allow noncitizens to vote in city and school board elections.

Talk about a solution in search of a problem, considering everything Angelenos are facing right now.

While the specter of la migra continues to haunt the city, far more crushing are problems that affect everyone — affordability, housing, traffic, pollution. Maybe Soto-Martínez and his colleagues should double down on fixing those things first and sell their message better to voters instead of picking up a new issue?

I know the first-term council member comes from a good place. His parents were formerly undocumented, just like my dad, and he has been a fierce advocate for immigrants going back to his labor organizing days. I have friends without legal status and others in the DACA program for people who came to the U.S. illegally as children. I think giving them, as well as green card holders and others with papers, a chance to participate in elections is a righteous idea.

But to paraphrase the Book of Ecclesiastes, there’s a time and a place for everything. In 2026, Angelenos should be focused on electing people and approving initiatives that will improve the city for everyone, not a narrow plank benefiting a slice of the population.

So I called up Soto-Martínez and challenged him to convince this doubting Tomás.

He hopes his proposal will reach the City Council later this month for a vote on whether to place it on the November ballot. If voters pass the measure, it goes back to the council to decide when — if ever — to enfranchise the immigrants.

The proposal, already vilified in conservative media, isn’t as radical as it seems. Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, but there’s a well-established history of their participation in local ones, including in Vermont and Maryland. They can already vote in L.A. neighborhood council elections, and in San Francisco school board elections if they have a child in the district.

Besides, L.A. has long led the way in weaving undocumented immigrants into the fabric of civic life.

This is a sanctuary city where Mayor Karen Bass has stood up to President Trump’s xenophobia. Where eight of the 15 council members are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Where LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho — himself formerly undocumented — has striven to make local schools as welcoming as possible (Carvalho is on paid leave after the FBI raided his home and office earlier this year). Even the LAPD learned decades ago that it’s better to embrace undocumented immigrants than castigate them for their lack of legal status.

“If you’re contributing to this economy, you should have the right to decide who represents you,” Soto-Martínez told me.

Fair point. But isn’t thumbing our noses at Trump asking for more of what he has already inflicted on L.A., making life even more miserable for undocumented immigrants? Could he use the noncitizen voter rolls as a list of whom to deport? Besides, doesn’t extending the franchise to noncitizens give fuel to his crazy conspiracies about stolen elections?

“You always hear, ‘Don’t poke the bear, don’t instigate them,’ but that’s not how you deal with a bully,” Soto-Martínez replied. “They’re coming at us already. While they’re removing people’s right to vote in the Supreme Court, we’re expanding it. … And it has nothing to do with Trump. It’s about fairness.”

Tell that to Trump.

I mentioned that Santa Ana — a city far more Latino than Los Angeles, though not as liberal — decisively rejected a similar measure in 2024. Soto-Martínez’s fellow Democratic Socialist council members, Ysabel Jurado and Eunisses Hernández, have voiced their support for his measure. But I wonder whether the full council will move it along to voters in a year when some members, including Soto-Martínez, are running for reelection.

I couldn’t get a comment from Bass. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who’s running against her, said in a statement that Soto-Martínez’s push “is worth taking seriously” but that it’s “critical to getting this right, and we must not make decisions lightly or quickly.”

“We’re going to have to organize,” Soto-Martínez acknowledged. “But we live in a political moment where it’s the right conversation to have about what this city stands for.”

Avance Democratic Club President Nilza Serrano at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights in 2022.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

He’s going to have to convince people like Nilza Serrano. She’s president of Avance, L.A. County’s largest Latino Democratic club, and heads the California Democratic Party’s Latino caucus. Serrano is no wokosa — she supported Rick Caruso in the last mayoral election and is now siding with Bass.

While Serrano thinks Soto-Martínez is on to something, she said that voting rights for noncitizens are a nonissue for the people she’s trying to get to the polls for the June primary and November general elections. The economy and Trump’s deportation deluge are more on their minds.

I asked if Soto-Martínez’s proposal would cheapen citizenship for people like her. Serrano and her family came here legally from Guatemala in the 1980s before becoming U.S. citizens, a process that took years.

“Not for me,” she replied. “But it’s hard to say for others. I’d have to do a little bit more research.”

So I continued with my own research, calling someone I was sure would have a fit about the idea: Los Angeles County Hispanic Republican Club President David Hernandez.

“Isn’t San Francisco already doing it?” the Navy veteran cracked.

I thought Hernandez would go on an anti-liberal rant, but.…

“I believe there’s a strong argument,” he said, “that if someone has established residency and is a member of the community and suffered the consequences of whatever local policies will be enacted, they should have a say in who gets elected.”

Did the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta, California’s original avenging Latino, suddenly possess Hernandez? To make sure I was hearing right, I asked again if noncitizens voting in L.A. elections is a good thing.

How could he support that, as a Trump-voting Republican?!

“We have to be pragmatic,” he replied. He approves of noncitizens voting in L.A. neighborhood council elections, because that’s true local control.

He understands that allowing them to vote in municipal elections might come off as an insult to the memory of civil rights activists who lost their lives fighting for that right for Black Americans. But U.S. citizens are already taking it for granted, he noted — turnout in the November 2022 L.A. mayoral election was a pitiful 44%.

“Maybe noncitizens will appreciate voting more than citizens,” he said.

I’m still not fully convinced that Soto-Martínez’s push is wise right now, but I like that he’s being careful.

“We need to get in the weeds of this,” he said of the City Council’s deliberations, which he characterized as attempting to ensure maximum benefit and minimum fallout.

Let’s see what they come up with in a few weeks.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court often resembles a feuding family where the same heated arguments go on for years.

The justices disagree over race, religion, abortion, guns and the environment, and more recently, presidential power and LGBTQ+ rights. And while they try to maintain a cordial working relationship, they don’t claim to be good friends.

“We are stuck with one another whether we like it or not,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote last year in her book, “Listening to the Law.”

And like it or not, the testy exchanges and simmering anger have been increasing, driven by the sharp ideological divide.

The three liberals had known since October the conservative majority was preparing to elevate partisan power over racial fairness.

By retreating from part of the Voting Rights Act, the court’s opinion last week by Justice Samuel A. Alito will allow Republicans across the South to dismantle voting districts that favor Black Democrats.

Justice Elena Kagan, who first came to the court as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, denounced the “demolition” of a historic civil rights law.

In dissent, she quoted Marshall’s warning that if all the voting districts in the South have white majorities, Black citizens will be left with a “right to cast meaningless ballots.”

But Alito and Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined the court 20 years ago believing the government may not make decisions based on race.

Their first major ruling was a 5-4 decision that struck down voluntary school integration policies in Seattle and Louisville. It was illegal to encourage some students to transfer based on their race, Roberts said.

When faced with a redistricting case from Texas, Roberts described it as the “sordid business … [of] divvying us up by race.”

With President Trump’s three appointees on the court, the conservatives had a solid majority to change the law on race. Three years ago, they struck down college affirmative action policies.

Watching closely were states such as Alabama and Louisiana.

They had been sued by voting rights advocates, and both had been required to draw a second congressional district with a Black majority.

Their state attorneys appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing these race-based districts were unconstitutional.

In a decision that surprised both sides, Alabama lost by a 5-4 vote in 2023.

Roberts said the Voting Rights Act as interpreted by past decisions suggests Alabama must draw a second congressional district that may well elect a Black candidate. The three liberals agreed entirely and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh cast a tentative fifth vote.

Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas filed strong dissents, joined by Barrett and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Last year, the justices agreed to decide a nearly identical appeal from Louisiana, and this time Roberts joined the conservative majority and assigned the opinion to Alito.

He argued the Voting Rights Act gave “minority voters” an equal right to vote but not a right to “elect a preferred candidate.”

The decision dealt a double blow to Black Democrats because an earlier 5-4 opinion by Roberts freed state lawmakers to draw voting districts for partisan advantage.

That ruling, combined with Wednesday’s decision, will bolster Republicans trying to maintain their narrow hold on Congress.

As if to highlight that point, the court’s six Republican appointees were guests of President Trump at Tuesday’s White House dinner for King Charles.

Just a few days before, Trump had slammed the court in another social media post.

“The Radical Left Democrats don’t need to ‘Pack the Court’. It’s already Packed,” he wrote. “Certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad.” They had struck down his sweeping tariffs, he said, “they probably will … rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship.”

That didn’t stop him from inviting them to the White House, nor did the partisan appearances dissuade them from attending.

Alito is enjoying his moment of acclaim as the voice of the conservative legal movement.

In March, the Federalist Society held a day-long conference in Philadelphia to celebrate the “Jurisprudence of Justice Alito.”

He is the subject of two new books. One, by journalist Mollie Hemingway, calls him “the justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution.”

The other, by author Peter S. Canellos, is “Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement.”

Alito attended Princeton during the Vietnam War and was put off “by very privileged people behaving irresponsibly,” as he later described his classmates.

He then went to the Yale Law School and, like Thomas, left with a lasting disdain for the left-leaning faculty and students.

Alito has a book of his own scheduled to be released in October. It is called “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country.”

Last month, rumors and speculation had it that Alito and perhaps Thomas planned to retire this year so Trump and the Senate Republicans could quickly fill their seats.

At age 76, Alito is at the peak of his influence and has no interest in stepping down, and he and Thomas confirmed to news organizations they had no plans to retire this year.

For 20 years, Alito has cast reliably conservative votes at the Supreme Court and regularly argued for moving the law farther to the right.

Most famously, he wrote the court’s 5-4 opinion in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe vs. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion.

Roberts issued a partial dissent, arguing the court should uphold Mississippi’s 16-week limit on abortions and stop there.

Alito has called religion a “disfavored right,” and there too a change is underway.

In the decades before his arrival, the court had handed down steady rulings barring taxpayer funds for religious schools or religious ceremonies or symbols in public schools or city parks.

Then, the court viewed these official “endorsements” of religion as violations of the 1st Amendment’s ban on an “establishment” of religion or the principle of church-state separation.

Those decisions have faded into the background, however.

Instead, Alito, Roberts and the four other conservatives see today’s threat as one of discrimination against religion, not official favoritism for religion.

They ruled church schools and their students may not be denied state aid because of religion. Similarly, Catholic charities and other religious groups may not be excluded from publicly funded programs because they refuse to accept same-sex parents, the justices said.

They upheld a football coach’s right to pray on the field. And they ruled for a wedding cake maker in Colorado and other business owners who refused to serve same-sex couples in violation of a state civil rights law.

Religious liberty has now replaced separation of church and state as the winning formula at the Supreme Court.

The next test on that front may come from Louisiana, which calls for the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classes.

In the past, the court had ruled such religious displays violated the 1st Amendment, but it is not clear that the current majority will agree.

The court’s oral arguments for this term ended last week. Many of them were dominated by questions from liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

A statistical tally by Adam Feldman for Scotusblog found that Jackson, the newest justice, had spoken twice as many words as the most talkative of the conservative justices.

Her arrival shifted the “center of verbal energy” to the liberal side, Feldman wrote. While Jackson “sits in a class of her own,” Sotomayor also presses the argument on the liberal side.

The court now has about eight weeks to hand down the decisions in 35 remaining cases. Usually, May and June can be a trying time because of intense disagreements over the opinions in close cases.

But for the liberal justices, it also may be a time mostly for writing dissents.

Mark Vientos hit two homers and drove in four runs and right-hander Clay Holmes allowed one run in 6⅔ innings as the New York Mets beat the Angels 5-1 on Sunday.

Holmes (4-2) allowed four hits with three walks and six strikeouts as the Mets took two of three games from the Angels and won a series for just the second time since April 7. New York also won two of three against Minnesota (April 21-23).

The Mets used Bo Bichette at shortstop Sunday, one day after Ronny Mauricio fractured his left thumb and was placed on the injured list. Shortstop Francisco Lindor also is on the injured list with a calf strain.

Jorge Soler had an RBI single for the Angels and right-hander Jack Kochanowicz (2-1) gave up two runs on five hits over 6 1/3 innings with three walks and six strikeouts. Los Angeles had ended a season-high seven-game losing streak Saturday. The Angels are 2-12 since April 18.

The Angels took a 1-0 lead in the first inning when Zach Neto and Mike Trout worked walks to open the game against Holmes and Soler hit a one-out run-scoring single to center.

As Holmes settled in, the Mets grabbed a 2-1 lead in the fourth when Vientos hit a towering two-run homer 427 feet, halfway up the rock pile beyond the center field fence.

The Angels were in the game until the eighth inning when Tayler Saucedo hit Brett Baty with his first pitch of the inning and was replaced by Nick Sandlin. Carson Benge had an RBI double to right for a 3-1 lead and Vientos followed with another two-run home run, this time to left.

The Mets’ outfield made a pair of spectacular plays, with left fielder MJ Melendez making a diving catch in the sixth inning and Benge making a diving catch in right for the second out of the ninth.

Up next for the Angels: RHP Jose Soriano (5-1, 0.84 ERA) will pitch in Monday’s series opener against White Sox RHP Davis Martin (4-1, 1.95 ERA).

WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Friday blocked President Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access, a key pillar of the Republican president’s plan to crack down on migration at the southern border of the U.S.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.

The panel concluded that the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t authorize the president to remove the plaintiffs under “procedures of his own making,” allow him to suspend plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum or curtail procedures for adjudicating their anti-torture claims.

“The power by proclamation to temporarily suspend the entry of specified foreign individuals into the United States does not contain implicit authority to override the INA’s mandatory process to summarily remove foreign individuals,” wrote Judge J. Michelle Childs, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Biden.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in a statement that the appellate ruling is “essential for those fleeing danger who have been denied even a hearing to present asylum claims under the Trump administration’s unlawful and inhumane executive order.”

Judge Justin Walker, a Trump nominee, wrote a partial dissent. He said the law gives immigrants protections against removal to countries where they would be persecuted, but the administration can issue broad denials of asylum applications.

Walker, however, agreed with the majority that the president cannot deport migrants to countries where they will be persecuted or strip them of mandatory procedures that protect against their removal.

Judge Cornelia Pillard, who was nominated by Democratic President Obama, also heard the case.