A federal judge in Texas whose courthouse has become a favorite destination for conservative litigants and business groups challenging Democratic President Joe Biden's agenda is criticizing the federal judiciary's leadership for caving to "political pressure" by trying to adopt policies to curb "judge shopping."
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, laid out his criticisms in remarks delivered on Saturday during a Federalist Society conference in Fort Worth, where he presides.
O'Connor said the U.S. Judicial Conference, the judiciary's top policymaking body, appeared to give into "external efforts to undermine judges" when in March it adopted a policy intended to curb a tactic in which litigants steer cases challenging government policies to sympathetic judges in small courthouses.
"Appearing to cave to criticism from commentators and political officials, this Judicial Conference proposal rejects the idea that there are no partisan judges," O'Connor said, according to a copy of his Saturday remarks posted on the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.
O'Connor, who did not respond to a request for comment, is one of two active judges in Fort Worth, part of the Northern District of Texas. Both are appointees of Republican presidents and are known for handing conservative litigants victories in cases over Democratic-backed causes.
O'Connor, perhaps best-known for once declaring Obamacare unconstitutional in a holding the U.S. Supreme Court later reversed, acknowledged his court today often plays host to high-profile cases.
"Nothing too controversial, mind you -- things like the line between governmental power and parental rights, First Amendment cases, and cases highlighting the tension between federal power and the power of border states," he said.
The Biden administration, Democratic lawmakers and others have argued that such cases are often the product of "judge shopping," in which litigants steer lawsuits to small courthouses, or divisions, where only one or two sympathetic judges preside.
The Judicial Conference, the judiciary's top policymaking body, in March sought to disrupt that tactic with a new policy requiring a lawsuit challenging a federal or state laws be assigned to a judge randomly throughout a federal district, not the smaller division it was first filed in.
O'Connor said the policy focused entirely on remedies the "Department of Justice, the world's largest law firm and regular forum shopper complained of—that is, injunctions and vacaturs," and avoided addressing other forms of judge shopping in patent and bankruptcy litigation.
He said "thankfully," some judges and others pushed back on the policy. Following blowback, judicial policymakers clarified that the policy was discretionary and non-binding, leaving it to each district court to decide how to implement it.
The Northern District of Texas has not adopted it, after Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey said the consensus among judges on his court was to not do so at this time.
"But this pressure remains a constant and will not ease up anytime soon," O'Connor said.
He noted that the U.S. Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Civil Rules is considering whether to adopt a binding rule mandating random case assignment.
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