Groups Ask Texas Courts to End Judge Shopping with New Rules

A coalition of progressive groups is asking the four federal district courts in Texas to adopt rules to prevent the ongoing practice of judge shopping.

In a lettersent Monday night, the National Immigration Law Center and eight other organizations told the chief judges in the four Texas districts that litigants, led by state officials, are exploiting the courts’ case assignment rules to enjoin federal policies nationwide.

“While the undersigned organizations are frequently adverse to the parties who are presently engaged in judge shopping, the practice these organizations seek to curb is one that is almost universally condemned,” the coalition said.

Federal district courts have the power to decide how cases are assigned to the judges that sit on their court. Some federal district courts, like those in Texas, are divided into divisions based on geography and have only one or two judges assigned to hear the cases filed there.

Litigants judge shop by filing their lawsuit in divisions where they believe they have the best odds of getting a judge that will rule in their favor based on those case assignments.

Specifically, Texas has filed 22 of its 34 cases against the federal government to date in courts in which a single judge then received at least 95% of all of the division’s cases, the coalition said, adding that a judge appointed by a Democratic president has only initially been assigned to one of Texas’ 34 cases.

The group proposed the district courts in Texas alter their rules and make case assignments random and district wide for specific classes of cases.

Those classes include cases brought on behalf of a state, government, official, or agency; cases that seek to enjoin, set aside, or vacate federal government statutes or agency actions; cases in which no party alleges a connection to the division the case was filed in; and cases in which a party seeks relief to others beyond those involved in the litigation.

“A simple majority vote of these courts’ judges would suffice to alter those arrangements,” the coalition said. “In the interim or alternatively, each individual judge is able to proactively discourage the practice by scrutinizing those cases before them lacking a particularized connection to the forum division.”

In proposing new court rules, the coalition said it wasn’t questioning the impartiality of any of Texas’s federal district judges but rather trying to foreclose a practice that implicitly labels many of the districts’ judges unfit based on the party of the president who appointed them.

The coalition also includes the American Federation of Teachers, Catholics for Choice, Impact Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Immigrant Justice Center, People For the American Way, Project On Government Oversight, and Reproaction.

Its letter comes about a month after the American Bar Association passed a resolution urging federal courts to “eliminate case assignment mechanisms that predictably assign cases to a single U.S. District Court judge without random assignment” in cases challenging federal and state regulations, and laws.