Amarillo Slim – The Chances of Getting a Neutral Judge in This Federal District

 

Forum shopping – filing lawsuits in easy-to-access courts in notoriously biased judicial districts to secure that biased judge – has always been a problem, but now, it has become a national epidemic, particularly with federal judges appointed by Donald Trump. Plaintiffs’ lawyers often want to inconvenience a defendant by filing in a jurisdiction far from the plaintiff, requiring lots of travel, the necessity to engage a local attorney with less of a track record or experience than in the plaintiff’s locale, perhaps even far from all the relevant events, witnesses and evidence.

A competent and neutral court would, in such circumstances, invoke the “inconvenient forum” option. According to the Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, “Forum non conveniens refers to a court's discretionary power to decline to exercise its jurisdiction where another court, or forum, may more conveniently hear a case.” But these Amarillo federal appointees – and more than a few other Trump-appointed judges – want to make national policy and simply refuse to let go of an important case that is vastly more appropriate elsewhere.

Trump appointees with limited experience – like the Miami federal judge (Aileen Cannon) presiding over the Trump documents criminal trial – also refuse to let go of case well beyond their clear ability to handle them. This, despite strong suggestions from more experienced judges in that district to move the case to a judge who has the relevant experience… and even after multiple reversals from the conservative Federal Circuit Court of Appeals above her.

Trump’s Supreme Court appointments, which have shifted that panel to rather pronounced 6-3 rightwing tribunal, has developed a pattern of sustaining these biased trial court decisions, in reversing decades of Supreme Court precedents, from abortion rights, gun control, voting and civil rights even to moving complex matters requiring deep expertise away from Congressionally approved expert federal administrative agencies to judges with strong biases but no particular expertise.

The poster judicial district for forum shopping, with an amazing track record with the US Supreme Court, is the Northern District of Texas. Writing for the August 1st Journal of the American Bar Association, Anna Stolley Persky drills down into the facts: “Since being appointed to the bench in 2019, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who sits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo, has become known for rulings affecting efforts to ensure minors’ access to birth control and expand LGBTQ+ rights.

“Recently, he’s been in the spotlight for a nationwide injunction suspending the federal approval for mifepristone, a medication described as an abortion pill because it allows a woman to terminate a pregnancy in its early stages. In June, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court found that the plaintiffs who challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s loosening of how the drug could be prescribed lacked standing, keeping access to the drug available [but without rejecting the underlying basis for Kacsmaryk’s ruling].

“Also, in December 2022, Kacsmaryk blocked a nationwide effort to end an immigration program started during then-President Donald Trump’s administration that requires some asylum-seekers from Mexico to be sent back while their immigration cases are ongoing.

“How does one judge end up handling so many high-profile cases? The answer is found in the way in which some federal courts distribute case assignments… In most of the country’s 94 federal district courts, cases are assigned to judges randomly. But the Northern District of Texas assigns cases by where they get filed, allowing parties to choose their judge. The district has 11 judges and is split into seven divisions. While some divisions are large, others, like Amarillo, are notably small. Kacsmaryk takes the bulk of the cases in the Amarillo division.

“Lawyers who practice in federal courts know that, and Kacsmaryk has become the judge of choice for conservative activist lawyers, says Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law… What’s happening in Texas is ‘forum shopping on steroids,’ Clapman says. ‘It encourages gamesmanship and more extreme legal theories taking hold because plaintiffs can find and get completely receptive judges to make big policy decisions.’

“But Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, says judge shopping is ‘as old as the federal courts,’ and the real issue is the ability of a single judge to render a nationwide injunction… Concerns about judge shopping got so noticeable that the Judicial Conference of the United States jumped into the question of case assignment in March, and Congress is looking into the issue… ‘The concern, of course, is that people shouldn’t be able to pick a particular judge for his or her point of view,’ says Judith Resnik, a constitutional law professor at Yale Law School and the founding director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law.”

Indeed, many of these form-shopped cases feature Biblical quotes and raw rightwing dogma as if these excerpts double for statutory or case law. What you see is isolated courts, where a single rightwing judge with bias virtually tattooed on his or her forehead, usurps “those arrogant” bastards in the seat of the federal government, Washinton, D.C. where most of the evidence, expertise and witnesses reside. What you get is chaos and instability where any action taken in the relevant venue (e.g., D.C. for government regulations, NYC and Delaware for major corporate matters, etc.) can be rent asunder by a distant and isolated judge, lacking underlying experience or expertise with a self-directed mission to take down laws and administrators, makes a major ruling that impacts the entire United States.

I’m Peter Dekom, and political dogma has infected all three branches of government, where doctrinaire extremes replace logic and the established rule of law to erode some of the most fundamental aspects of our national identity, rejecting the very notion of governing for “what’s best for the nation.”