Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer sent the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas a letter Thursday asking that he “reform the method of assigning cases” to judges to put an end to forum shopping by litigants.
Sen. Schumer, in the two-page letter sent April 27 to Chief Judge David Godbey, said that “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.”
“The State of Texas is the most egregious example,” Sen. Schumer said. “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. 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.”
Sen. Schumer points out that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the Biden Administration seven times in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District where U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge. As a result, any cases filed in the Amarillo Division are automatically assigned to Judge Kacsmaryk.
The most recent example is the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization, sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration challenging the agency’s approval of the abortion-related drug mifepristone, which the FDA approved more than two decades ago.
Judge Kacsmaryk, who was a lawyer for a conservative religious legal organization before being nominated by President Donald Trump to the federal bench, ruled earlier this month that the FDA did not adequately review mifepristone’s safety.
“Nothing requires the Northern District to let plaintiffs pick their judges like this,” Sen. Schumer wrote to Chief Judge Godbey. “The purpose of the split [of the district into divisions] is to reduce travel time for jurors, criminal defendants and other local litigants by allowing cases to be tried locally.”
Sen. Schumer noted that the Western District of Texas last year changed its case assignment procedures for Waco to prevent plaintiff’s lawyers in patent infringement cases from judge shopping.
“The Northern District could and should adopt a similar rule for all civil cases,” he wrote.
Sen. Schumer said Congress will take up the issue if the Northern District does not address it.