I am sad to report that William Albert Norris, who served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit has passed away. I clerked for Norris in 1984-85, and I will miss him more than I can say. Among many other accomplishments, Bill Norris was the author of the panel opinion in Watkins v. United States Army, 847 F.2d 1329 (1988). The Watkins panel opinion held that gays were a suspect class. It is now almost thirty years since the panel opinion: although the Supreme Court has yet to adopt this theory in a majority opinion, what was then considered "off the wall" is now clearly "on the table."
Norris's autobiography, Liberal Opinions: My Life in the Stream of History, is available from Amazon.com.