The Trump judge ruling on the Mar-a-Lago affair is defying established law | Laurence H Tribe and Phillip Allen Lacovara

Why is a young, ideologically-driven judge with a lifetime appointment to the bench allowed to ignore legal precedents?

Judge Aileen Cannon's two rulings in the Mar-a-Lago affair offer a master class in illustrating how a young and ideologically-driven judge can badly bungle important issues of law and public policy and distort the proper role of courts in protecting state secrets and supervising criminal investigations. The Justice Department, wisely, is appealing.

The catalogue of errors and abuses is too long for a single column, so we touch only on the low points.

Laurence H Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School

Phillip Allen Lacovara was deputy solicitor general of the United States, counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor, and President of the District of Columbia Bar