On Thursday, a New York court of appeals overturned the $454 million civil fraud judgment previously issued against President Donald Trump and his family business.

Through a series of opinions totaling 323 pages, a judicial panel ruled that the substantial penalty placed on the 45th and 47th president, the Trump Organization, and other executives, including Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., was unconstitutional.

The panel concluded, “Although the court’s injunction effectively targets the defendants’ business practices, directing the defendants to pay nearly $500 million to New York State constitutes an excessive fine that breaches the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” according to the prevailing opinion in the divided decision by the five-judge panel. “While the harm was real, it was not so disastrous as to warrant a payment of nearly half a billion dollars to the State. The statute rightly permits the Attorney General to preemptively act to prevent calamities, which she did, thereby deterring further fraudulent activities by the defendants specifically, and regulating market behavior more broadly. However, having met these objectives, the State cannot justifiably enhance its victory with a significant punitive fine.”

Though the appeals court eliminated the substantial fine for the Trump parties, it affirmed the lower court’s capacity to rule on the case and confirmed New York Attorney General Letitia James’ right to file the lawsuit.

“We concur with the Supreme Court that the Attorney General operated within her legal bounds by initiating this case and served the public interest in doing so,” stated the concurrence by Justices Dianne T. Renwick and Peter H. Moulton. “Additionally, we find that the Supreme Court appropriately ruled solely on claims that are timely as per the relevant statute of limitations. Nevertheless, we propose a modification to the Supreme Court’s ordered remedy.”

Ultimately, the divided decision leaves the court without a majority opinion presenting a clear path forward. Instead, two justices reluctantly consented to the vaguely phrased “decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality.”

In real terms, the findings of the lower court are being allowed to stand while the judgment is not. This will allow the parties to essentially re-litigate the matter before the Empire State’s final state court of appeal. The contours of that appeal are not set in stone.

Justices John R. Higgitt and Mary Rosado explain why they would have gone further in the defendants’ favor and ordered a new trial.

“It appears that defendants are correct when they argue that Supreme Court’s errors affected the conduct of the trial,” their concurrence reads. “Supreme Court’s error permeated the trial.”

The secondary concurrence explores the trial court record at length and reaches the conclusion that Justice Arthur Engoron mixed up the elements of two different causes of action – illegality and fraud – when issuing a favorable opinion for the attorney general’s office.

Specifically, the secondary concurrence argues the trial court used the “magnitude of disparity” between varying real estate appraisals to determine whether or not the defendants were intentionally trying to deceive. That, the justices argued, is not how the law is written.

The fifth panelist – Justice David Friedman – would have gone even further in the defendants’ favor and dismissed the case entirely.

Quite a bit of the third concurrence is focused on politics.

Friedman opines, at length:

I am troubled that my colleagues are affirming Supreme Court’s liability finding, notwithstanding that three out of the five members of this panel clearly believe that the judgment should be vacated, as the Attorney General has not yet proven her case. Nonetheless, what emerges from this Court’s vacating the $500 million disgorgement award, with which I concur, is the frustration of what appears to me to have been the Attorney General’s true aim in bringing this action. Plainly, her ultimate goal was not “market hygiene,” as posited by Justice Moulton, but political hygiene, ending with the derailment of President Trump’s political career and the destruction of his real estate business. The voters have obviously rendered a verdict on his political career. This bench today unanimously derails the effort to destroy his business.

The tertiary concurrence advises the court to “correct clear error” in the context of an earlier decision in the same case.

U.S. President Donald Trump along with his children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. arrive for a press conference January 11, 2017 at Trump Tower in New York (TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images).

In that earlier decision, Ivanka Trump had James’ allegations against her dismissed due to the statute of limitations, while the case against the other Trump defendants went forward.

Here, Friedman would have the holding in that earlier case actually foreclose the present case entirely – because he does not think James’ lawsuit and the ensuing judgment “vindicate” any clear “public purpose.” Similarly, the secondary concurrence would apply the holding in that earlier iteration of the case to remove several legs from James’ argument due to the statute of limitations.

In sum, Higgitt, Rosado and Friedman argue James did not sufficiently prove her case about the underlying fraud – at least not yet.

The prevailing concurrence strongly rejects this interpretation.

Moulton and Renwick argue, at length:

In this appeal, we have before us an actual record which demonstrates clearly that defendants committed fraud and illegality…We do not have before us some hypothetical future misuse of the statute. The record also refutes Justice Friedman’s implication that the judicial system is being used for “political ends” in this litigation. The antithesis is true. Given the evidence uncovered during the Attorney General’s investigation…the “political” choice would have been to not bring this case, thereby avoiding a fight with a powerful adversary. Her allegations have been tested at every stage of this maximalist litigation and for the most part have been upheld. We now have before us the evidence the Attorney General amassed and it demonstrates that defendants engaged in a decade-long pattern of financial fraud and illegality.

In a statement, James’ office praised the outcome that allowed the fraud judgment to stand and vowed to pursue the matter on appeal.

“The First Department today affirmed the well-supported finding of the trial court: Donald Trump, his company, and two of his children are liable for fraud,” the prosecutor said. “The court upheld the injunctive relief we won, limiting Donald Trump and the Trump Organization officers’ ability to do business in New York. It should not be lost to history: yet another court has ruled that the president violated the law, and that our case has merit. We will seek appeal to the Court of Appeals and continue to protect the rights and interests of New Yorkers.”