I haven't read the entire ACLU vs. NSA wiretapping opinion yet (the case I've been following is the EFF vs. AT&T case filed in another court). However, it struck me as odd, becuase I understood this very same judge had decided to dismiss the case because of the government's "state secrets" privelege which can basically shut down any pending lawsuit.

Then the judge in the EFF case decided it could go forward in spite of the government's assertion of state secrets, and the judge in the ACLU case seems to have relied on that opinion to enter a summary judgement. The ACLU judge should have realized that when she did so the NSA would appeal. So you'd expect her to at least try to write an airtight opinion to survive the appeal. It looks like she didn't.

UPDATE OK, turns out the judge who dismissed an ACLU lawsuit over the wiretaps was Judge Kennelly in the case Terkel vs. AT&T Inc.

UPDATE II Finished the opinion, and there's a point (right about the end of the discussion on state secrets) where it stops sounding like a legal opinion and begins sounding like an editorial. That's why the experts have been discussing whether it's well-reasoned. You may enjoy reading an interesting post by somebody who doesn't agree with the President.

UPDATE III Lawrence Tribe, who represented Gore in the notorious 2000 court case, weighed in, called the opinion "unusually casual and surprisingly breezy," said that Judge Taylor should "be held to account for the shoddy quality of [the] legal analysis" and said the opinion "seems almost to have been written more to poke a finger in the President's eye than to please the legal commentariat or even, alas, to impress an appellate panel."

Of course he also says "When a presidential program that wouldn't have been exposed at all but for leaks that the administration is trying not just to plug but to prosecute is manifestly lawless in the most fundamental respects; when that program challenges constitutional as well as statutory constraints on executive authority; when it is promulgated by an executive branch in the hands of characters who care little about the rule of law, much less about legal nuance; and when the lawmakers who are posturing as the program's critics have in fact engineered a statutory "fix" that amounts to little more than a whitewash in the offing -- when all these things are true, it's not costless to harp on the details of a basically correct legal denunciation of that program to the point of ridiculing the motives and capacities of the judge delivering the blow."

Interesting. For those who haven't dealt with college professors recently, that sentence amounts to "things are so bad, we need to be careful in complaining about the flaws in this opinion."