Should district court judges go "Reinhardt" on election laws during the coronavirus pandemic?

That’s the gist of Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos’s conclusion in a recent University of Chicago Law Review Online piece.

If there’s a saving grace here, it’s the ratio of lower court to Supreme Court activity: about twenty-to-one, so far, in the area of pandemic-related election litigation. The sheer volume of these suits guarantees that the vast majority of them will never be subjected to Supreme Court review. To be sure, the Court will probably decide additional pandemic-related cases—and decide them badly, misapplying sliding-scale scrutiny and furthering its ideological agenda. But as Judge Stephen Reinhardt once said of the Justices, their limited caseload means “[t]hey can’t catch ’em all.” What they don’t catch in the leadup to the November election is likely to be better, legally and democratically, than what they do.

Professor Stephanopoulos believes that the Supreme Court is wrong on law (and on the political consequences) on a variety of election law cases, including the Supreme Court’s recent decision in RNC v. DNC out of Wisconsin. But advocating for district courts to, for lack of a better phrase, “go Reinhardt” on the Supreme Court struck me as particularly notable.