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Insurance case is ‘but a speck in the recesses of interstellar space,’ high-profile appeals judge writes

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 28, 2025, 3:07 pm CDT

In a span of less than a week, a conservative federal appeals judge has written two opinions that are getting attention—for taking a tough stand against the mistaken deportation of an immigrant in one case and for waxing philosophical in another case.

In an April 17 opinion, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III took the Trump administration to task for “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process.”

Wilkinson wrote the “blistering” opinion for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Richmond, Virginia, in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia of Maryland, according to the New York Times.

Abrego Garcia was deported to a prison in El Salvador in Central America because of an “administrative error.” The case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem.

Now, Wilkinson is getting attention once again for an April 23 opinion in an insurance dispute involving a man on a lawn mower struck and killed by an underinsured motorist, according to Above the Law and the Judicial Notice newsletter at Original Jurisdiction.

The 4th Circuit held that the man’s estate was entitled to $150,000 under the plain terms of the man’s underinsured motorist coverage—and nothing more.

Wilkinson engaged in “existential, metaphysical musings” at the end of his opinion, according to Judicial Notice.

Here is what Wilkinson wrote: “What after all does it matter? A single, seemingly ordinary, rather technical insurance case. One among the many hundreds of rulings judges make each year.

“What does it matter? A case but a speck in the recesses of interstellar space and in the four-plus billion years since our solar system’s birth. What does it matter, this case deserted by both space and time?

“To be human is to live in the here and now. This small case extracts courageous meaning from the vast impersonality in which it resides. Its immediacy confounds infinity; its passions light the dark. We have given it our best; the litigants have given it their best. The trial court has done the same. We do not overlook for a moment the tragic passing of the insured but neither can we ignore the contract under South Carolina law that defines the insurer’s obligation.”

The insurance case is Owners Insurance Co. v. Walsh.

Wilkinson, 80, was appointed to the 4th Circuit by former President Ronald Reagan, the New York Times reports in a story about his background. He is the “son of a patrician Virginia banker,” an Army veteran and a law grad of the University of Virginia.

He delayed his legal education after one year to unsuccessfully run for Congress in 1970 as a Republican. After law school, he worked as a law professor and in the U.S. Department of Justice.

On the bench, the New York Times reports, Wilkinson has “a long track record of conservative rulings under his belt, having criticized rulings establishing abortion rights while writing approvingly of a broad conception of presidential power.”

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