(iPoster) Add to Cart: Judge Shopping in the Northern District of Texas

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Law and Courts & Elections and Voter Behavior
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts

Abstract

This paper investigates how and why the Northern District of Texas became an attractive venue for hyper-conservative litigants. I argue that Matthew Kacsmaryk - the sole judge sitting in the Amarillo Division - is a core contributor to NDTX’s appeal amongst legal conservatives for four main reasons: (1) his extreme and ideological rhetoric, (2) his deployment of lower evidentiary standards of harm (thus making it easier to prove Article III standing), his conservative approaches to administrative regulation, and his willingness to issue nationwide injunctions. I use a combination of process tracing and case analysis to support this argument. I trace how the institutional design of the judiciary allows district courts to establish their own rules for case assignment, how conservative legal organizations have come to exploit this process, and how Kacsmaryk advances ideologically extreme rulings in line with the preferences of these conservative legal organizations. The process tracing occurs within FDA vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

Author

• Lauren Gage, CUNY-Graduate Center