McConnell’s New Bill Reveals Unrelenting Pressure To Curb Judge-Shopping – By Kate Riga (TPM) / April 11, 2024
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed that the energy around addressing the increasingly common practice of plaintiffs handpicking their judges had unexpectedly flared, and more expectedly died down.
In a shock to experts who have been harping on the issue to anyone who would listen for years, the Judicial Conference — the staid policy-making body for the federal courts — announced in March a new policy to randomize case assignments for certain kinds of lawsuits. This would stop right-wing litigants from judge-shopping their way into a single-judge division where they could ask for a national injunction — securing themselves a friendly judge who’d more likely than not block whatever Biden administration policy they didn’t like for the whole country.
But hope that this new policy would end the practice was short-lived. The chief judge for the Northern District of Texas, one of the most popular destinations for judge-shoppers thanks to Trump appointee and anti-abortion Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that “the consensus was not to make any change to our case assignment process at this time.”
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