Wow!

As Allyn says: Musk filed in that district specifically to get Judge O'Connor, who Musk figured would be on his side.

This is a lawsuit against companies who quit advertising on Twitter because they quit advertising.

Love to see it.

Will we be able to end judge shopping?

The Judicial Conference of the United States has strengthened the policy governing random case assignment, limiting the ability of litigants to effectively choose judges in certain cases by where they file a lawsuit.

[...]

“The random case-assignment policy deters judge-shopping and the assignment of cases based on the perceived merits or abilities of a particular judge. It promotes the impartiality of proceedings and bolsters public confidence in the federal Judiciary.”

[...]

Some plans assign cases to a judge in the division of the court where the case is filed. In divisions where only a single judge sits, these rules have made it possible for a litigant to pre-select that judge by filing in that division.

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The amended policy applies to cases involving state or federal laws, rules, regulations, policies, or executive branch orders. District courts may continue to assign cases to a single-judge division when they do not seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions, whether by declaratory judgment and/or any form of injunctive relief.

[...]

The 26-member Judicial Conference is the policy-making body for the federal court system. By statute, the Chief Justice of the United States serves as its presiding officer and its members are the chief judges of the 13 courts of appeals, a district judge from each of the 12 geographic circuits, and the chief judge of the Court of International Trade.

  US Courts

This crackdown on “judge shopping” is long overdue. It has also provoked a rather telling reaction from Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis.

In a letter to the chief judges of all 94 federal district courts on Thursday, the senators urged those jurists to ignore the new policy — which they laid at the feet of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — because, in their view, these judges should ignore “partisan battles in Washington, D.C.”

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[I]n some parts of the country, especially Texas, the result has been to allow a single judge to hear every case filed in a particular division.

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For example, the nationwide challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone (one of two drugs used in the most common and safest abortion procedure) was filed in Amarillo, Texas — not a courthouse with any specific connection to mifepristone, but one in which it had a 100% chance of being assigned to a certain Trump-appointed district judge, former anti-abortion advocate Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk remarkably, if predictably, ruled against the FDA’s approval of the drug — an approval that occurred 23 years ago.

A nationwide challenge to Biden administration efforts to combat social media disinformation was filed in Monroe, Louisiana — where it had a 100% chance of being assigned to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty. And the state of Texas, which has filed 37 different lawsuits in Texas district courts challenging Biden administration policies, has filed a majority of them in single-judge divisions — and none in Austin (where the Texas government is actually located) or Houston or Dallas or … you get the point.

[...]

Quietly, some courts changed their case assignment rules. And some judges in single-judge divisions, like Judge Jeff Brown in Galveston, changed their local rules to require litigants to provide some justification for why a lawsuit with no obvious geographic tie to that division was nevertheless filed there. But these reforms were scattershot. Bigger changes required intervention at a higher level.

  MSNBC

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Good one, Chuckles

Yeah, they're passing that around for a good laugh.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"Uterus Inquisition Squad"

Access to medicine shouldn’t be controversial, and it wouldn’t be but for the Christian fundamentalist forces who’ve been emboldened by the right-wing takeover of the Judicial Branch and the Supreme Court’s revocation of reproductive rights. Now, at the very moment mifepristone has become one of the few means of securing widespread abortion access, these people have targeted it for destruction. Back in November, the inaccurately named Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) brought a lawsuit against the FDA challenging its initial approval of mifepristone. The ADF claims that the FDA did not follow its own procedures when it approved the drug.

The lawsuit is so ridiculous that it hardly warrants discussion on the merits. First of all, the statute of limitations allows challenges to FDA procedures for only six years and mifepristone has been approved for over 20. Moreover, Congress passed an amendment to the Food and Drug Act in 2007 that revised the FDA’s procedures and deemed any drug previously approved by the agency to be in compliance with the new rules. There are also jurisdictional problems with the lawsuit. But even if you overlook all these technical legal hurdles, the ADF’s core argument—that the FDA failed to consider the dangers of mifepristone—is wrong. Mifepristone is safe, and no amount of Gregorian chanting from the self-appointed Uterus Inquisition Squad can prove it otherwise.

Unfortunately, we have to treat this incoherent nonsense masquerading as a lawsuit as a serious threat to abortion drugs because of the judge who recently got hold of the case: Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is a Trump-appointed district court judge in Texas.

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He was an anti-gay crusader for a Christian right law firm before Trump raised him up to be a judge. He claims that homosexuality is a “disorder.” He’s attacked the right to contraception and denounced the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s.

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[This case has] not ended up in front of Kacsmaryk by accident or bad luck. Right-wingers have actively sought out Kacsmaryk for their most dubious legal claims by means of the 21st-century version of “forum shopping.”

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In the past, one of the more popular forms of forum-shopping saw lawyers trying to game out whether a state court or federal one would lead to a better outcome. They could do this because many state and federal laws overlap, and many corporations (and the federal government) can be sued in any state they do business in.

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The Supreme Court tried to put a stop to this kind of forum shopping in 1938, in a case called Erie Railroad v. Tompkins. The so-called Erie Doctrine required that in cases where there is a question of whether to apply federal or state law, a federal judge must apply the law as it would be understood in the states where the judge resides.

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You’ll never see a challenge to federal gun regulations filed in California, or a lawsuit against the fossil-fuel industry filed in Texas. Lawyers will always seek to take advantage of the laws most favorable to their clients or positions, wherever those laws happen to exist.

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[L]awyers Steven Vladek and Max Wolson point out that Texas regularly removes cases to federal court to get specific judges, and it works.

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But that’s not what right-wingers are doing now. Instead, they are “judge shopping”—trying to take advantage of the fact that the judges themselves apply the laws differently based on which party appointed them and whether they have even a basic grasp of logic or fairness.

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In the North District of Texas, judges are assigned based on their “divisions,” which break the region down to places like Dallas, Lubbock, and Amarillo. Kacsmaryk is the district judge for Amarillo and, by rule, is assigned every single federal case filed there. If you bring a federal case in Amarillo, you are guaranteed to get Judge Kacsmaryk. As Ian Milihiser put it on Vox, this rule makes Judge Kacsmaryk “one of the most consequential public officials in modern-day America.”

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Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton regularly files suit in the Southern District of Texas, Victoria Division, where the case is guaranteed to end up in front of Judge Drew Tipton, another Trump appointee who is a virulent anti-immigration crusader. Paxton did it again this week to challenge another Biden immigration policy.

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There are no laws, rules, or doctrines to stop this kind of behavior. Arguably, both conservative and liberal lawyers can (and do) engage in judge shopping at some level. What’s supposed to make the process fruitless are the circuit courts of appeal and, ultimately, the Supreme Court.

  The Nation

So much for any liberal lawyer's hopes of judge or forum shopping advantage.

[C]ertain courts of appeal, like that of the Fifth Circuit that presides over Texas, have been captured by right-wing extremists just like the rest of the Republican Party. More problematically, we’ve seen the Supreme Court act quickly to overrule liberal district court judges on emergency appeal but leave in place rulings from conservatives for at least as long as it takes for their cases to make it all the way up to the highest court through normal order. That’s a process that can take years, and sometimes span presidential administrations.

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When you file a lawsuit, the judge should be picked from a pool of all federal judges in a state, and if we’re talking about a federal law, any judge in the country should be in the hopper.

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The circuits exist so that travel wouldn’t be too taxing for the judges, who lived in some central region of the district. But judges no longer need to take two horses and a palanquin hoisted by slaves to get from New Orleans to Amarillo. A Delta flight and an Uber can get anybody anywhere in this country in under 12 hours.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 04/13/2023:  The Texas judge ruled as expected.  Scrambling ensued.

Still ridiculous.