Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey of the Northern District of Texas told U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer that he is “not authorized to impose unilaterally a new method of case allocation” in order to eliminate forum shopping for favorable judges for specific kinds of cases.
In a two-page letter dated May 16, Chief Judge Godbey wrote to Sen. Schumer that he is “cognizant of the public perception of improper judge-shopping in single-judge divisions,” but he said that he is “confident that all the judges in this District are 100 percent faithful to their oaths of office.”
“The issues of single-judge divisions are long-standing, and they are not limited to any one class of litigant,” Chief Judge Godbey wrote. “I am not authorized to impose unilaterally a new method of case allocation for our district.”
Sen. Schumer, in a letter sent to Chief Judge Godbey on April 27, asked that he “reform the method of assigning cases” to judges to put an end to forum shopping by litigants.
Read Chief Judge Godbey’s letter here.
“Litigants have taken advantage” of current Northern District procedures that automatically assign cases to judges who sit in those geographic divisions, including divisions that have only one or two federal judges, in order to “hand-pick individual district judges seen as particularly sympathetic to their claims,” Sen. Schumer wrote.
Chief Judge Godbey, noting that he does not speak for all the judges in the Northern District, wrote that “the allocation of cases among our judges is a complex matter.”
The “random assignment of all civil cases across” the Northern District “would present logistical challenges” because of the huge geographic size of the district and because the local rules adopted by the federal judges in the district do not allow it,” the judge wrote.
Chief Judge Godbey points out that the Northern District is “geographically large” and “encompasses more than 96,000 square miles,” which he said is “approximately 75 percent larger than the entire State of New York.”
Any reconsideration of case allocation must also consider the “convenience of the jurors, witnesses, parties and attorneys,” the travel burden on court personnel and “the desire of communities to have local judges.”
In his original letter seeking reforms, Sen. Schumer called out the State of Texas and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as the “most egregious example” of judge shopping.
“It has sued the Biden Administration at least 29 times in Texas federal district courts, but it has not filed even one of those cases in Austin, where the Texas Attorney General’s Office is located,” Sen. Schumer wrote. “Instead, Texas has always sued in divisions where case-assignment procedures ensure that a particular preferred judge or one of a handful of preferred judges will hear the case.”