The federal judiciary’s new rules target “judge shopping.” That’s terrible news for Matthew Kacsmaryk and other partisan judges.
Plaintiffs hoping to reshape federal or state policies will no longer be allowed to choose which judge will hear their case, at least in federal court. A new policy announced Tuesday by the Judicial Conference of the United States, a government body that sets policy for federal courts, targets rules in some federal courts that the conference said “risked creating an appearance of ‘judge shopping.’”
At least in the short term, this policy is a massive victory for the Biden administration — and, indeed, for anyone who believes that federal and state policies should not rise and fall based on one outlier judge’s partisan views.
Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, for example, has been very aggressive in bringing lawsuits that challenge Biden administration policies before right-wing judges who have then issued sweeping, nationwide orders blocking those policies — sometimes on highly dubious grounds that are reversed, months later, by the Supreme Court.
You’re not supposed to be able to choose a judge like this, judges are supposed to be assigned at random our of the pool of trial judges in the district. But the problem is that some districts are subdivided further, to the point where the pool in the subdivided area consists of one judge, and you can guarantee a trial goes to that judge simply by finding someone to file who lives in the right zip code.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but there was a time that a lot of companies owned assets in East Texas because the judges (mainly T. John Ward) there were so friendly to patent trolls. A friend of mine did technical work for one of the law firms involved in TiVo vs. Dish. One company is headquartered in California, the other in Colorado. Where was the lawsuit? The Eastern District of Texas.