Emily Bazelon’s sorta defense of Judge Moore is definitely worth the read. But one aspect of it struck me as wrong, or at least incomplete:

Roy Moore is right that on its face, Granade’s order doesn’t require state probate judges all over Alabama — who weren’t named in the case Granade heard — to issue marriage licenses. Granade merely instructed Alabama’s attorney general not to enforce the state’s same-sex-marriage ban. That means a probate judge could go along with her decision, as some have, (and as clerks of the court did in Florida, after a similar district-court decision there went into effect in January). But they don’t necessarily have to. “If the 11th Circuit had invalidated Alabama’s gay-marriage ban, all the state-court judges would know what to do,” the Florida International University law professor Howard Wasserman, who has written about the Alabama dust-up, told me. “But the district court’s authority is much more limited.”