I am pleased to share comments from Judge Reed O’Connor (NDTX), who opened the Federalist Society’s 2024 Texas Chapter Conference in Fort Worth yesterday. Judge O’Connor spoke about forum selection and “judge shopping,” as well as recent proposals from the Judicial Conference.
Welcome to the Fort Worth Chapter of the Northern District of Texas. Fort Worth is honored that the Federalist Society has chosen to host its annual Texas Conference here.
I think you’ll find Fort Worth to be a very welcoming city, and I’m not here to judge-shop, as some people may think, Fort Worth really has a welcoming spirit.
If you saw the movie “12 Orphans,” you know that the orphanage was located in southeast Fort Worth. As the book on which the movie is based notes, “Fort Worth was one of the friendliest places for downtrodden children during the harshest days of the Great Depression,” and that welcoming spirit remains as strong today as ever.
This corner of Texas has a lot of rugged history. Fort Worth was founded in 1849 as an army outpost on the bluffs overlooking the Trinity River. It’s come a long way since then: It’s now the 11th largest city in the US, surpassing Austin, and was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country last year.
Despite its size, Fort Worth has maintained a strong sense of small-town charm and Western traditions, as evidenced by the historic Stockyards Entertainment District and the Sid Richardson Museum at Sundance Square.
At the same time, Fort Worth offers a top-notch cultural experience with incredible museums boasting artworks from the Renaissance to the 21st century, including Michelangelo’s first painting on display at the Kimbell Art Museum, and the world-class Bass Performance Hall.
In the heart of Fort Worth is the Federal Courthouse, a beautiful Depression-era WPA construction project that has been the site of many historic court cases.
In the very court where I preside, former Texas Governor Cork Stevenson sued then-Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson over the results of the 1948 Democratic Senate primary. The case was ultimately appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where Justice Black ruled in Johnson’s favor. The rest is history: Senator Johnson became Majority Leader, Vice President, and President.
In the same courtroom, Judge David Belew, a soldier who stormed the beaches of France in World War II and was shot on the day of the Normandy landings, presided over the longest aviation trial in U.S. history, which lasted 14 months.
And in this courtroom, Judge Terry Means handed down the nation’s first federal death sentence since the punishment was reinstated under the 1994 federal death penalty law.
These high-profile cases continue to be filed in this division. Some of these cases have implications on the topics we’ll be discussing today, but they are less controversial: cases that highlight the boundary between government power and parental rights, cases involving the First Amendment, cases that highlight the tension between federal power and the power of bordering states.
Of course, decisions in these cases often lead to outside efforts by many commentators, so-called watchdog groups, and even elected officials to undermine public support for the judiciary. But federal judges are given life tenure to protect them from public sentiment. That doesn’t make them immune to criticism. In fact, if you don’t like criticism, don’t be a judge.
But sometimes these decisions lead to threats and intimidation of presiding judges, or attempts to undermine the legitimacy of judges. Today, our distinguished panelists will discuss the difference between legitimate criticism and attempts to undermine the judiciary, the obligation that the legal profession has to uphold the judiciary, and why it’s important.
This argument is crucial when outside attempts to weaken the justices incite pressure from within the judiciary. This year, in response to political pressure that singled out certain justices, the Judicial Conference specifically targeted divisions among a single Texas judge. In what appears to have bowed to criticism from commentators and political insiders, the Judicial Conference proposal rejects the idea that there are no partisan judges, saying there are only judges who do their best to faithfully apply the law to reach the right decision.
Notably, the proposal does not target the longstanding practice of forum shopping, or as Judge Jim Ho put it, forum selling, in bankruptcy and patent courts. Such cases have billions of dollars of economic impact and have recently been highlighted by embarrassing scandals. But in the absence of similar political pressure from commentators and politicians, practices in these areas have not been affected by the reform efforts.
Instead, the proposal focused entirely on the remedies that the world’s largest law firm and the Department of Justice, which regularly visits the forum, are unhappy with: injunctions and quashing orders.The reason is clear: the Judicial Conference was responding to political criticism from outside.
Thankfully, judges and members of our profession have fought back, ensuring that the burden of access to justice is not placed too heavily on residents of our district based solely on where they reside. But this pressure persists and is not going to ease anytime soon. In fact, it appears the Judicial Conference Rules Committee intends to adopt procedures that would mandate case assignment guidance.
At a time like this, we are especially blessed to be part of an organization like the Federalist Society, whose primary purpose is to protect constitutional freedoms and to sponsor fair, serious, and open debate about the role of the courts in shaping the law, not the law as we want it to be. I think you will agree that today’s excellent program accomplishes that purpose.
In the current climate of efforts to undermine the judiciary, and as law schools and law professors across the country increasingly teach students to assume that judges with whom they disagree have bad intentions, there is no better place to host a critical dialogue about the judiciary than this conference, this circuit, and this chapter.
Thank you all for coming to this great city and for your continued service to our justice system and the people of the United States of America.
Welcome to Fort Worth!
