When it was mostly an internecine conflict, a judge from the Northern District of Ohio asking the Brethren of the Sixth Circuit why they think he’s crazy, as Judge Kopf explained, it all stemmed from a United States District Court judge doing the unthinkable: taking a mag to task.

I am going to be plain-spoken and provide you with a greatly condensed and summarized version of the facts. Judge Adams treated his colleagues very, very badly. He was especially nasty to magistrate judges. He improperly threatened an MJ with a contempt sanction for failing to get a report and recommendation on a Social Security case to the judge within the time required by the judge’s standing order. He isolated himself, despite good-faith efforts by his colleagues to patch things up, he refused to participate meaningfully in court governance and he childishly sniped at his colleagues. In a word, he was a jerk.

While federal judges may seem omnipotent from the outside, there are some institutional norms they don’t cross. Ever seen a federal judge direct the Bureau of Prisons to do something? Request? Sure. Implore. Maybe. But direct? Only in the rarest of instances, when something truly awful happens. Why not, when the judges certainly have the authority to do so, and they don’t need some screw’s permission to tell them not to serve Nutraloaf three times a day?

There’s a certain collegiality within the federal bureaucracy, unwritten but very much there. The various parts need each other to make the magic happen. Like any machine, if one gear refuses to mesh with another, it doesn’t work. No one involved in a bureaucracy doesn’t appreciate this. Except maybe Judge Adams.

But the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference didn’t find Judge Adams to be a jerk based on his smacking a mag around. They stripped him of his dignity and authority as conferred by Article III of the Constitution, predicated on his purported refusal to subject himself to a psych eval.

As Judge Kopf further noted, being a jerk doesn’t mean one’s nuts. Then again, having the vast power of a federal judge changes the equation a bit.

Now, I will flip sides. Judge Adams should have willingly agreed to be examined by independent examiners. When you are a federal judge and a group of colleagues question your mental status, you owe it to the public, and especially the lawyers and the litigants, not to be a stubborn ass.

All of us who are fortunate to serve as federal judges owe the public transparency. That transparency will often require sacrifice. The federal judiciary has been afforded wide latitude to police itself, and that is particularly true when it comes to questions of disability.[vi] Judge Adams should care more about the federal judiciary writ large than he cares about himself. Sadly, it is evident that Judge Adams cares more about himself than he does the federal judiciary.

Judge Adams didn’t heed this advice, and instead filed suit against the Committee.

In his lawsuit against the Sixth Circuit council and the Judicial Conference committee, Adams is claiming that forcing him to go through an involuntary mental health screening violates his constitutional rights to due process — he said he wasn’t given notice about what judicial duties he was allegedly unable to perform as a result of any suspected mental disability — and against unreasonable searches. He’s also challenging the constitutionality of the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, the federal law that lays out the authority of federal judges to mete out discipline.

The complaint, which Zoe Tillman attached to her article because she’s a great humanitarian and journalist, gets downer and dirtier.

Judge Adams objected in good faith to the Special Committee’s demand [for an independent psych eval], but nonetheless tried to accommodate the Special Committee. In November 2013, he voluntarily underwent an examination by a local, board certified psychiatrist, and in January 2014, he submitted a report of the examination to the Special Committee. The report concluded that Judge Adams did not suffer from any diagnosable mental disorder.

When the Special Committee persisted in its demand, Judge Adams agreed to undergo a further examination provided certain reasonable conditions were met. These included being provided specific information about the reasons for the examination, having input into the selection of the mental health professional chosen to perform the examination and the parameters of the examination, and agreed-upon limitations on any materials provided to the mental health professional selected to perform the examination. The Special Committee rejected every one of Judge Adams’ conditions.

At the core of his complaint, Judge Adams sought to know what factual basis there was for this highly intrusive demand that he both submit to the voodoo of some psychiatrist, and reveal his deepest mental-health secrets.* That there are people out there who would call a sitting federal judge crazy doesn’t do much to provide a justification for an actual demand for evaluation, or every federal judge would be constantly under scrutiny for their mental state, and not just Dick Posner.

Is Judge Adams entitled to the same sort of due process one would demand be given to murderers? Of course. Just because he’s an Article III judge doesn’t mean he’s stripped of all constitutional rights, particularly if the head of the Committee, Judge Danny Boggs, has it out for him the way the complaint suggests.

Yet, as Judge Kopf suggested, there remains a question of norms on the inside of the federal court onion that will both be exposed should this action end up in naked federal judge mud-wrestling, and threatened if a cog in the Rube Goldberg machine of the legal system is stressed so hard. Whether this will prove to be a bug or feature is another matter, and Judge Adams is not without reason to suspect that the Committee wants him evaluated because the shrink on retainer already believes his gear in the machine needs some screw-tightening.

On the outside of the onion, there are few groups as moderated and collegial as federal judges. It’s not that they hug and sing Kumbaya at circuit conferences, but they realize better than anyone that the Least Dangerous Branch depends on their acceptance by the public as a legitimate voice of reason, since they have no army to back up their mandates.

Judge Adams’ complaint, while still expressed in gentle terms, threatens to expose the underbelly of life inside the onion. But now that it’s filed, the question is which side, if any, will decide that maintaining judicial norms of civility are more important than winning this relatively petty battle.

*Elsewhere in the complaint, it’s noted that there weren’t any deep secrets to be found, but that Judge Adams objected as a matter of principle.