Federal judiciary leaders on Friday released the text of a revised policy directing district courts to assign judges at random in civil cases that have statewide or national implications, making clear that the policy is a recommendation and that they cannot force district courts to follow it.<\/p>\n
The Committee on Court Administration and Case Management of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, released the guidance after receiving intense pushback about the change from judges, conservative lawmakers and judicial experts.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, conference officials announced that cases with statewide or national implications that are filed in single-judge divisions should no longer be automatically assigned to the judges who preside there. Such divisions exist in rural parts of the country where courthouses are spaced very far apart.<\/p>\n
District courts may continue to assign cases to a single-judge division if those cases don\u2019t seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions through declaratory judgment or injunctive relief, the Judicial Conference said. When random assignments are required, the case should be assigned to a judge within the same judicial district.<\/p>\n
The policy does not apply to criminal or bankruptcy cases, according to the memo released Friday. \u201cCase assignment in the bankruptcy context remains under study.\u201d<\/p>\n
The memo, shared with district court judges across the country, includes guidance explaining how the judges might follow the updated rule \u201cwhile recognizing the statutory authority and discretion that district courts have with respect to case assignment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Judicial Conference officials said their intent is to address widespread concerns about \u201cjudge shopping\u201d \u2014 or filing a lawsuit in a courthouse where the lone judge is known or suspected to be sympathetic to a particular cause. The tactic has drawn scrutiny in abortion, immigration and environmental cases, among other hot-button topics, as well as in patent cases, which have been concentrated in a single-judge courthouse in the Waco division of the Western District of Texas.<\/p>\n
But the changes proposed to address the concerns have drawn a wave of new objections, with some saying the new policy violates federal statute 28 U.S.C. 137, which says that the chief judges of each district court are responsible for assigning cases.<\/p>\n
In the Friday memo, the committee said it was providing instructions on how to deter judge-shopping, not issuing a direct mandate, which would conflict with chief judges\u2019 case assignment authority.<\/p>\n
The policies and the accompanying guidance \u201cshould not be viewed as impairing a court\u2019s authority or discretion,\u201d Jackie Koszczuk, spokeswoman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, said. \u201cRather, they set out various ways for courts to align their case assignment practices with the long-standing Judicial Conference policy of random case assignment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russell Wheeler, a judicial expert at the Brookings Institution, said the guidance \u201csuggests, without saying so directly,\u201d that conference officials are acting on their authority under federal statute 28 U.S.C. 331 to \u201csubmit suggestions and recommendations to the various courts to promote uniformity of management procedures and the expeditious conduct of court business.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cConfusion resolved, and the Guidance on first reading seems eminently sensible,\u201d Wheeler said in an email.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis guidance was helpful,\u201d Chief Judge Randy Crane of the Southern District of Texas wrote in an email. \u201cIt made it clear that the policy adopted by the Committee and the Conference was not a mandate. As such, it does not conflict with each court\u2019s statutory authority to manage its docket. The guidance reflects that it is only an encouragement to the courts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democratic and Republican members of Congress, the Biden administration and organizations such as the American Bar Association have raised concerns about judge shopping in the past, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also highlighted the issue in his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.<\/p>\n
In November 2021, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and then-Democratic senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont criticized the \u201cextreme concentration\u201d of patent cases in U.S. District Judge Alan Albright\u2019s division in Waco. In a letter addressed to Roberts, who oversees the Judicial Conference, the senators asked the chief justice to direct the policymaking body to look into the matter and implement reforms.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe this creates an appearance of impropriety which damages the federal judiciary\u2019s reputation for the fair and equal administration of the law,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n
In issuing its guidance, the Court Administration and Case Management Committee noted that \u201cpublic confidence in the case assignment process requires transparency\u201d and suggested that judicial districts post their rules for case assignments on their websites and \u201cavoid case assignment practices that result in the likelihood that a case will be assigned to a particular judge\u201d unless there is a specific determination that the case should be heard in a particular location.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Judicial Conference\u2019s longstanding policies supporting the random assignment of cases and ensuring that district judges remain generalists deter both judge-shopping and the assignment of cases based on the perceived merits or abilities of a particular judge,\u201d the memo reads.<\/p>\n
Much of the backlash against the new policy guidance has come from conservative judges and lawmakers, who accused the Judicial Conference and Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) of an attempt to grab power from conservative jurists in isolated jurisdictions.<\/p>\n
Two days after the revised policy was announced, before the specifics were made public, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sent letters to about a dozen chief judges across the country advising them to ignore the change, saying it was up to them \u201cto manage the caseload of your court according to the dictates of local circumstances and convention.\u201d<\/p>\n
The letter was also signed by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Tillis \u2014 who in 2021 questioned the concentration of patent cases in Waco. A spokesman for Tillis did not respond to a request for comment on the senator\u2019s position Friday or early Saturday.<\/p>\n
On Friday, after the text of the new guidance was released, a conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said he was \u201cglad to see that folks appear to be backing off.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJudges should follow the law, and leave the politics to Congress,\u201d U.S. District Judge James Ho said in an email. \u201cThe last thing we should do is gerrymander the rules to favor one particular political viewpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other judges have expressed concerns about practicality.<\/p>\n
Chief Judge Alia Moses of the Western District of Texas said it was hard to imagine how a random-case-assignment policy would work in her far-flung district, where the next courthouse can be a multiday drive away. The desire to avoid targeting a specific lawsuit to a particular judge \u201cis understandable,\u201d Moses said in an email, \u201cbut difficult to apply in the real world in a district that is 93,000 square miles in size.\u201d<\/p>\n
In announcing the policy on Tuesday, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th District Jeffrey Sutton, chair of the Judicial Conference\u2019s executive committee, told reporters that one option for dealing with geographical distance issues could be holding some court proceedings online.<\/p>\n
Wheeler, the judicial expert, questioned whether the conference will be able to persuade all district courts to follow the policy. He said judicial leaders could use the rulemaking process to amend the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which govern civil proceedings in the district courts.<\/p>\n
But given the \u201chostile reaction, especially from those where the judge-shopping practice has flourished,\u201d such a move would be a \u201ctough slog,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat leaves Congress. Dream on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Federal judiciary leaders on Friday released the text of a revised policy directing district courts to assign judges at random in civil cases that have statewide or national implications, making clear that the policy is a recommendation and that they cannot force district courts to follow it. The Committee on Court Administration and Case Management […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}