A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Bessemer attorney against the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who made up the majority opinion legalizing gay marriage nationwide.

U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Haikala tossed out the lawsuit based on judicial immunity. The U.S. 11 th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in a previous case that federal judges have judicial immunity for lawsuits regarding decisions they make and that she is bound by that precedent, she said.

The hearing lasted less than 30 minutes.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office represented the five justices – Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kegan – at the hearing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Don Long argued in both the hearing and in the motion seeking dismissal of the lawsuit that U.S. Supreme Court justices have regularly been the target of lawsuits, but courts have routinely dismissed them as being barred by judicial immunity.

Austin Burdick, the man who filed the lawsuit in February, said after the hearing that he plans to appeal to the 11 th Circuit.

Burdick had argued that judicial immunity for federal judges is not found in the U.S. Constitution or previous law and it has been developed out of precedents set in cases over the years. Judicial immunity also creates a second class of people who are able to abuse the law, he said.

One of the issues for him, Burdick said, is that there is no accountability put in place for federal judges.

Long told the judge that what Burdick was describing is “how a system should be designed if it was being created out of whole cloth.”

Haikala said that part of our country’s history has been the development of common law. Just because judicial immunity is not found in the constitution “it does not mean it is an invalid proposition,” she said.

Haikala also posed the question of how the court could function if they could be sued each time they make a decision.

In his lawsuit, Burdick had argued that in their decision in the Obergefell case declaring same-sex marriage legal that the justices went “beyond a manipulation, twist, strain, or unique perspective on the text and crosses over in to an abandonment of the Constitution.”

The lawsuit cited the five justices for violations of the 5th Amendment, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and sought damages exceeding $6 million.