The policy-making body of the federal judiciary is clamping down on the system that conservatives have successfully used in recent years to hamstring President Joe Biden’s agenda and other federal policies, including those concerning reproductive rights.
The new policy seeks to curb “judge-shopping,” the strategy where litigants strategically file lawsuits in courthouses where the cases will be guaranteed to be heard by judges perceived to be sympathetic to their arguments.
While the strategy has long been used in patent cases, there been a concerted uptick for politically charged, wide-reaching cases that have been filed in Texas by Republican state attorneys general or conservative, private-sector parties.
The lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication abortion drug mifepristone was one such case; several Texas lawsuits seeking nationwide orders blocking Biden administration policies, including on immigration, gun safety or the environment, have been filed in such single-judge divisions as well.
The Judicial Conference of the United States announced Tuesday a new policy that will broaden the pool of judges who could be assigned to hear cases seeking state-wide or nationwide orders, making it more difficult to single out a particular judge, although it will still be possible to seek out a favorable pool of judges to hear cases.
Under the new policy, such cases seeking nationwide or state-wide orders will go into the lottery system used by the entire district. For instance, the abortion drug case was filed in the Amarillo Division of US District Court of the Northern District of Texas, where US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk – an appointee of Donald Trump who had previously worked for a religious liberty legal organization – is…
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