Case Study 13.2 — Forum-Shopping and the Single-Judge Division Problem
Why this case study
The structural critique of nationwide injunctions and forum-shopping is not just a partisan complaint. It is an institutional question about whether federal-court adjudication looks legitimate to the citizens whose lives it shapes. When a litigant can file a case in a venue where the assigned judge is, as a probabilistic matter, very likely to rule in the litigant's favor — and when the resulting ruling has nationwide effect — the structure of the system is producing outcomes the system was not designed to produce. Both political parties have used the practice. Both have complained when the other party uses it. Reform has been proposed and resisted by both sides depending on which side is benefiting.
This case study walks through one well-known recent example — the mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, originating in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas — and uses it to examine the structural critique. The aim is not to say whether the underlying policy is right or wrong; the aim is to look at the procedural mechanics, the bipartisan reform debate, and the institutional response. The case study pairs the Amarillo example with the Northern District of California progressive forum-shopping pattern in order to keep the structural critique honest.
1. The procedural facts
In November 2022, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — a coalition of medical organizations opposed to abortion, formed shortly before the lawsuit — filed suit in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas. The Northern District of Texas has six divisions: Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Amarillo, Wichita Falls, and San Angelo. Each division has its own assigned active judges. The Amarillo Division has, since 2019, had one active district judge: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed by President Trump in 2019 and confirmed by a 52–46 Senate vote.
When a civil case is filed in the Amarillo Division, the assignment is automatic: it goes to Judge Kacsmaryk. There is no random-assignment lottery within the division because there is no pool to draw from. The plaintiff's choice of venue is, as a practical matter, the plaintiff's choice of judge.
The plaintiffs in the mifepristone case were not based in the Amarillo Division. They were national medical organizations whose members practice across the United States. The standing theory rested on the claim that some of the organization's members might encounter patients experiencing complications from mifepristone and would need to provide treatment, thereby suffering an injury. That theory of standing was thin — the Supreme Court would later unanimously reject it — but the venue choice allowed the plaintiffs to put the case in front of a judge whose prior writings on the subject suggested a hospitable reception.
In April 2023, Judge Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary order staying the FDA's 2000 approval of mifepristone, finding that the plaintiffs had a likelihood of success on the merits and that the equities favored relief. The order was unprecedented: a federal district court had never before stayed an FDA drug approval that had been in place for more than two decades.
2. The Fifth Circuit's modification
The case proceeded to the Fifth Circuit. A panel — Judges Ho, Elrod, and Wilson, all Republican appointees — modified the order. The panel narrowed the relief, leaving the 2000 approval intact but staying the FDA's 2016 and 2021 modifications, which had made mifepristone available later in pregnancy and through telehealth and mail-order distribution. The panel's modification was less dramatic than Judge Kacsmaryk's original order but still represented a significant disruption to the FDA's regulatory framework.
The panel's modification illustrated a recurring pattern in the Fifth Circuit's work: a district-court ruling that goes further than the appellate panel will sustain, followed by a panel modification that narrows but does not reject the ruling. The composition of the Fifth Circuit during this period (twelve of seventeen Republican appointees) made en banc review unlikely to produce different results — the en banc majority would likely have affirmed at least the panel's modified position.
3. The Supreme Court's unanimous reversal
The Department of Justice sought certiorari. The Supreme Court granted, heard oral argument in March 2024, and decided the case in June 2024 as FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The Court unanimously reversed (9–0), holding that the medical-association plaintiffs lacked Article III standing because they could not demonstrate any individualized injury traceable to the FDA's actions. Justice Kavanaugh's opinion for the Court was sharply written; the absence of a single dissent — across an ideologically diverse Court — was institutionally noteworthy.
The 9–0 standing decision did not address the merits of the FDA's regulatory choices. It did not say whether the FDA's 2016 and 2021 modifications were lawful. It said only that these particular plaintiffs could not bring this particular suit because they had no concrete, particularized injury. The mifepristone regulatory framework was preserved as it stood. The challenge could be refiled by different plaintiffs (and a separate case challenging the FDA's actions, brought by several state attorneys general including Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho, was already pending and continues).
4. The structural critique, steel-manned
The mifepristone case generated a wave of institutional commentary. The strongest version of the structural critique runs roughly as follows:
The single-judge division allowed plaintiffs to choose the judge. Plaintiffs filed in Amarillo not because the dispute had any particular connection to the Texas Panhandle, but because the venue produced a judge whose prior writings made the outcome predictable. This is a form of forum-shopping that the federal system was not designed to permit.
The nationwide-injunction tool gave one district judge the power to set national policy. Even after the Fifth Circuit's modification, the resulting order would have substantially changed FDA practice nationwide. The combination — one judge, one national policy halt — concentrates extraordinary power in a single trial court, in a way the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the historical equity tradition do not contemplate.
The Supreme Court's 9–0 reversal arrived more than a year after the original order. Even though the plaintiffs ultimately lost, the litigation had real-world effects: pharmaceutical manufacturers had to adjust to legal uncertainty, providers and patients had to plan for possible regulatory changes, and the FDA's regulatory authority was effectively contested for the duration. The eventual reversal does not undo those costs.
The pattern is not unique to one party. Progressive litigators have used the Northern District of California, the District of Hawaii, and the District of Massachusetts in analogous ways. In the early Trump-1 years, multiple immigration-policy challenges were filed in the Northern District of California (where the active-judge composition was favorable to plaintiffs) and produced nationwide injunctions against the travel ban, against the rescission of DACA, against the family-separation policy, and against various asylum rules. The injunctions were, in turn, often modified or narrowed on appeal. The overall structural feature — venue selection producing favorable trial-court rulings, followed by appellate review and Supreme Court intervention — was the same. The political valence was the opposite.
The structural critique, rigorously stated, applies to forum-shopping by either side. It is a critique of the design of the federal-court venue and assignment system, not a critique of any individual judge's politics.
5. The structural defense, steel-manned
The other side of the argument is also serious.
Litigants have always had some venue choice. The Federal Rules permit suits to be filed in any district where the defendant resides, where a substantial part of the events occurred, or, for cases against the United States, in the District of Columbia or where the plaintiff resides. Some venue choice is built into the system. The fact that a plaintiff chooses a hospitable venue is not, in itself, an abuse — it is what plaintiffs in any litigation system do.
Single-judge divisions exist for sound geographic reasons. Amarillo, Wichita Falls, Marshall, and similar small-population divisions exist because federal courthouses are positioned to serve litigants, jurors, and witnesses across large geographic areas. The fact that only one judge sits in such a division is a function of caseload, not of design malice. Reforming the assignment rules to require random assignment across an entire district would impose costs on rural litigants and could result in the closure or downgrading of small-division courthouses.
The substantive rulings, if mistaken, are correctable through appellate review. That is what the appellate hierarchy is for. When Judge Kacsmaryk's ruling exceeded what the Fifth Circuit would sustain, the panel modified it; when the modification still went too far, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed. The system worked. Reforming the assignment rules would address an issue that the appellate hierarchy already addresses, and would do so at the cost of judicial efficiency and rural access.
Critics of single-judge divisions are often, in practice, criticizing the substantive politics of particular judges. Concerns about Amarillo and Wichita Falls have come overwhelmingly from progressive critics; concerns about the Northern District of California have come overwhelmingly from conservative critics. If the structural critique applies symmetrically, it should be acceptable to its critics that the symmetric reform would also constrain progressive forum-shopping. In practice, support for reform is correlated with whose policies are being challenged in any given administration.
The Judicial Conference's March 2024 guidance is the right response — voluntary, modest, district-by-district. It allows districts to maintain their existing practices where local conditions make sense and to adopt random assignment where it does not. A more aggressive reform — congressional legislation or mandatory rule changes — would impose uniformity that the federal system has historically resisted.
6. The Judicial Conference's response
In March 2024, the Judicial Conference of the United States issued guidance recommending that civil cases of broad national importance be assigned at random across the entire district, rather than within a single division. The guidance was formally voluntary, came from the Conference's Committee on Court Administration and Case Management, and was endorsed by Chief Justice Roberts.
The reception was mixed. Some districts adopted the guidance immediately; others did not. The Northern District of Texas, which would have been most affected, declined to adopt the recommendation as a matter of formal policy, citing its long-standing local rules. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that would have made random assignment mandatory; the bill did not advance. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) opposed the legislation as an inappropriate intrusion into the federal judiciary's internal management. As of 2026, the question remains unresolved.
7. What the case study illustrates
The mifepristone case is not a story about a single rogue judge. It is a story about a structural feature of the federal-court system that produces, in some districts, near-deterministic judge assignment for cases brought to specific divisions. That structural feature has been used by litigants on both sides of the political spectrum to obtain favorable trial-court rulings, with nationwide effects, that the Supreme Court has sometimes affirmed and often modified or reversed.
The 9–0 reversal in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is itself a useful institutional fact. The Supreme Court, including its conservative majority, was willing to throw out a high-profile lower-court ruling on standing grounds that were not narrowly partisan. The system contains corrective mechanisms. But the corrective mechanisms operate slowly, after substantial real-world disruption, and they depend on the Supreme Court's willingness to take cases and decide them on the merits or on standing.
A reader looking for a clean partisan narrative — Bad Conservative Judges or Bad Progressive Judges — will not find one in the institutional record. What the record shows is a system whose venue and assignment rules were designed for a smaller, less politically salient federal docket, and that now must process litigation strategies that were not contemplated when the rules were written. Reform is contested across the spectrum. Defenders of the current system on each side are most fervent when their side is benefiting. The honest analytical task is to evaluate the structural design on its merits, independent of the partisan valence of any particular case.
Discussion questions
- The structural critique of forum-shopping applies symmetrically to the Northern District of California (progressive forum-shopping during Republican administrations) and the Amarillo Division (conservative forum-shopping during Democratic administrations). Why has reform been so difficult? What does that suggest about how partisan reform debates work in general?
- The Supreme Court reversed Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine 9–0 on standing grounds. What does the unanimity tell you about the Court's institutional posture? Does it weaken or strengthen the structural critique of single-judge divisions?
- The Judicial Conference's March 2024 guidance was voluntary. Is voluntary guidance the right approach to a structural problem, or should reforms be made mandatory through legislation? Steel-man both positions.
- How would you reform the assignment rules if the design choice were yours? Be specific about the trade-offs. Would your reform apply to all civil cases, only to cases of national importance, only to cases against the federal government? How would you handle rural divisions where random assignment would impose travel costs on litigants?
- Compare the mifepristone case to the Brown implementation period (case study 13.1). In both periods, federal district courts have made consequential rulings against political resistance. What is similar about the institutional dynamics? What is different?