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.
Among other things, this practice turned Matthew Kacsmaryk, an obscure advocate on the Christian right appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Northern District of Texas, into one of the most powerful government officials in the entire country. Because Kacsmaryk is the only federal trial judge in Amarillo, Texas, any case filed in Amarillo was automatically assigned to him.
The Judicial Conference’s new policy is unlikely to strip Kacsmaryk, or any other judge, of jurisdiction over any case currently on his docket. But it does place significant new limits on litigants’ power to choose which judge will hear any new case that they file in the future.
How cases are assigned to judges in federal courts
The federal judiciary is divided into 94 different geographic districts, which normally encompass either all or part of a state. In many districts, newly filed cases are assigned randomly. So, for example, if a plaintiff files a lawsuit in a district with three Democratic…
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