Judge Shopping & Schedule A (Guest Blog Post)

By guest blogger Sarah Fackrell, Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law Plaintiffs are often allowed to choose their own forum. But they’re not supposed to be able to choose their own judge. And yet, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, some Schedule A plaintiffs appear to be doing just that. For example, the maneuver I call “defendant pinching” generally goes like this: Plaintiffs will file Schedule A cases against some number of defendants. If they draw certain judges, they immediately amend their complaint to drop all but one of the defendants. They then refile a new case against the dropped defendants, which is randomly assigned to a new judge. Plaintiffs sometimes perform this maneuver repeatedly, amending down and refiling over and over again until they get one of a certain subset of the NDIL judges. Some judges have called out—and even sanctioned—plaintiffs over this maneuver. When questioned, some plaintiffs have said that they using this…