Judge Alsup’s Passion Informs Sharp Focus of Legal Opinions

William Alsup was camping in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains when he looked up to see massive thunderheads and broken white clouds forming.

With the same wooden Tachihara film camera pioneering photographer Ansel Adams recommended he buy, Alsup snapped a single image of the unfolding, dramatic scene.

Since that 1992 evening, Alsup, who was then a San Francisco attorney, has risen to become one of California’s leading federal district court judges overseeing cases affecting the scope of President Donald Trump’s executive power and the future of the generative AI industry. Earlier this year, he oversaw one of the first copyright lawsuits against an AI company, Anthropic.

Now, Alsup is preparing for a new chapter. On Dec. 31, the 80-year-old judge, who sits on the US District Court for the Northern District of California, plans to retire.

Alsup has built a reputation as a demanding and decisive judge with expansive interests outside the law. He’s written books about the history of California mountaineering, a memoir about growing up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, and a legal thriller contemplating a murder trial of JFK’s assassin. He still enjoys operating his ham radio and he knows how to write computer code.

But it’s Alsup’s life as a photographer that mirrors his approach to the law, where from his chambers he seeks to craft opinions with the same clarity as when he’s behind a camera.

The photo he snapped more than 30 years ago of the turbulent clouds, one of the his favorites among the thousands he’s taken of the mountain range, is a symbol of what Alsup seeks—not just in his photographs—but also his legal opinions: careful framing, sharp focus, and the ability to find and isolate a strong, clear subject.

“A photo should read well. The message of the image should come through clearly,” said Alsup, sitting in his Oakland, Calif., home.

Good legal writing, he says, should be just as clear. An opinion that uses powerful, pointed statements about the law or the facts of a case can eliminate all kinds of ambiguities.

“One sentence can be worth pages,” he said.

Mountain Photography

Alsup’s photos are organized into labeled boxes in his downstairs studio—Yosemite, the Minaret Wilderness, the Central Sierra, all sections for the rugged California mountain range that spans hundreds of miles along the spine of the state. He’s taken more than 150 trips out to the Sierra, usually with his camera in tow.

In the mid-1980s, he converted his garage into a darkroom. There, he stands over a large sink, stirring blank film in trays of liquid until an image appears on silver gelatin print, a chemical process that uses a metallic coating instead of ink. He spent years refining the chemical bath procedure that balances the black and white tones in his photos.

Some of his photos line the walls of the attorney lounge in the downtown San Francisco courthouse where he takes the bench. Those silver gelatin prints, unlike ink, will last for a hundred years without a hint of fading, he said.

Alsup’s passion for photography is well known among many in the California legal community. “He just has this big personality that’s reflected in all these other interests that he has,” said retired Judge Jeremy Fogel, who served alongside Alsup.

Growing up in Jackson, Miss., Alsup’s family didn’t have a camera at home. Among his greatest regrets, he said, was not having a camera when he was a student at Mississippi State University during the school’s desegregation in the late 1960s.

Fresh out of Harvard Law School, he purchased his first camera in 1972 while finishing his clerkship for US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Alsup bought a 35 mm camera for $10 from a neighbor in Washington, DC. One of his first photographs was an image of Douglas’s cluttered desk.

A year later, he moved to San Francisco and began working as an attorney at the firm Morrison & Foerster. He continued to use the 35 mm camera and took photography and film development classes with the city parks department. His interest grew as he discovered backpacking in the Sierra and drew inspiration from the great landscape photographers of that mountain range.

“I began to see Ansel Adams photographs that blew me away,” he said. “I said, ‘My God these are much better than anything I’ve ever done.’”

In 1979, Alsup wrote Adams a letter asking for recommendations for a large format camera that was light enough to carry while backpacking. Adams wrote back and encouraged him to purchase the set up that he still uses to this day: a 4x5 Tachihara and Tiltall tripod. For years, Alsup carried the 17-pound rig, strapped to his back, up mountains including the top of Mount Whitney, a Sierra peak that’s the highest point in the contiguous US.

Snapping a good photo on his Tachihara, requires concentration, patience, and precision. To achieve proper focus and framing, Alsup makes small adjustments to the tilt of the camera lens and its distance from the film negative in the back.

His close friend, John O’Grady, said Alsup was unlike other photographers. O’Grady had friends who did more experimental forms of photography that would blur or distort the final image.

“For Bill, that would be sacrilegious,” O’Grady said. “He’s very much an old school, traditional landscape photographer.”

Alsup could remove the camera from his backpack, set it up, shoot an image, and break it back down in about 15 minutes, he said. During a week-long backpacking trip, Alsup might bring only a dozen sheets of film.

The judge has never owned a digital camera, except for the one on his phone. Old-fashioned film cameras, he said, can achieve focus on objects both close up and far away within the same image, which digital cameras can’t do. Digital, he says, feels a bit like cheating.

“You can click off a dozen, maybe two dozen photos and then throw the rest away and keep one,” he said. “You’ve got to be more selective and careful with the old school style.”

Seeking Clarity in Law

When he’s out in the backcountry with his camera, Alsup is especially alert to the sky and clouds, looking for shadows on the terrain.

“Those shadows, if you wait for just the right moment, can help you distinguish between this ridge and the next ridge, or this valley and the next ridge,” he said.

That kind of clarity also directs Alsup’s view of the law: avoid ambiguity and bring the case into focus.

In his courtroom, arguments should be simple and clear, void of extreneous wording.

Take, for example, a dispute between a tenant and landlord over eviction notices. A judge writing an opinion could describe how the notices the landlord gave were illegal. But there’s enormous power in a simple, categorical statement like: “The landlord never gave a notice to the tenant that complied with the law,” Alsup said.

A defendant’s lawyer might write a brief that spends multiple pages on how multiple legal decisions stand against the plaintiff’s position. But Alsup says the best arguments are streamlined and focused.

“The point he’s trying to make, but he’s too afraid to say,” Alsup said, “is that there is no decision in history that has ever held what the plaintiff wants me to hold.’”

These kinds of statements are found throughout Alsup’s opinions.

This summer, when he ruled the generative AI company Anthropic violated copyright law when it downloaded books from illegal online pirate libraries to train its large language models, Alsup was direct.

“There is no decision holding or requiring that pirating a book that could have been bought at a bookstore was reasonably necessary to writing a book review, conducting research on facts in the book, or creating an LLM,” he wrote.

In February, Alsup was just as direct when he barred the Trump administration from conducting mass employee layoffs through its Office of Personnel Management which would have resulted in thousands of job cuts. “OPM does not have the authority whatsoever, under any statute anywhere, in the history of the universe” to direct the layoffs, he said at a hearing.

Alsup was especially alert to the clarity of his 2017 order blocking Trump from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, program, because the judge had a strong feeling the case would reach the US Supreme Court. Other judges, he said, might have been more cautious and dance around a controversial legal subject.

“I’m not afraid of my own shadow,” he said. “I will say exactly what I think ought to be the law or is the law.”

Edward Lee, an intellectual property and tech law professor at Santa Clara University, said Alsup’s written opinions and phrasings are illustrious.

“He often sprinkles in some memorable lines or pithy lines that really stand out,” Lee said.

‘The Most Beautiful Print’

The morning Anthropic agreed to settle for a record $1.5 billion with the authors who said the AI company stole their work, Alsup was in his darkroom.

He was fiddling with a large projector that he uses to enlarge film negatives. The enlarger projects the image onto light sensitive paper, and he uses an analog light-meter to dial in the proper exposure, paying close attention to when the black and white tones form in the image.

Once a week, often in the early morning as NPR plays on an old radio next him, Alsup can be found in his darkroom perfecting his prints. When it gets cold, he flips on a little electric heater in the corner. His cabinets and drawers are filled with handwritten notes and diagrams detailing his experiments with chemicals and light. An Ansel Adams poster hangs on the garage door.

The churn at one of the busiest court in California will continue after he retires. His replacement on the court was already filled in 2021 when he took senior status.

After he hangs up his robe, Alsup will be in his darkroom, bringing more images to light.

“I love being down here,” he said. “I cannot explain the satisfaction I get out of this old technology, that film, the silver gelatin, trying to get the most beautiful print I can.”