NY AG Forum Shopped in Eugene

Forum shopping is the tendency of litigants to file suit in the court they expect to get the most favorable judges. New York Attorney General Letitia James is one of 21 blue state attorneys general suing the Trump administration to stop the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and she knew where to shop.

Did James file in Albany, NY? No way! That local court has a few Republican appointed judges.

She filed in the most progressive-friendly venue, a court without a single Republican appointee: the Eugene Division of the Oregon District Court. Eugene’s federal court is a stacked deck. Judge Mustafa Kasubhai is a Biden nominee I previously wrote about. Chief Justice Michael McShane is an Obama nominee, and Ann Aiken is a Clinton nominee.

The State of New York drew Judge Aiken, who presided over the long-running Juliana litigation, where a group of children argued that they had standing to challenge Oregon energy policy. Read where law blogger Jon Adler has chronicled Judge Aiken’s jurisprudential fantasies. Judge Aiken has been reversed by the Ninth Circuit several times. It appears that Dodd-Frank’s hyper-independent agency is susceptible to similar whiplash.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.