Category: Article Share

“Alliance is fundamentally a case about judge-shopping, a practice that sometimes allows litigants to choose which judge will hear their lawsuit. In this case, the plaintiffs — doctors who oppose abortion and organizations representing those doctors — selected Matthew Kacsmaryk, a longtime advocate for the Christian Right who then-President Donald Trump placed on the federal bench — to be their judge.

The plaintiffs were allowed to choose their own judge because Kacsmaryk’s Texas-based court assigns all lawsuits filed in Amarillo, Texas, to him. So all that these plaintiffs had to do to get Kacsmaryk to hear their case was file their suit in his home city.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion was, well, exactly what you would expect from a judge who is determined to fight abortion no matter what the law says. His 2023 decision struck down the FDA’s decision to approve the drug mifepristone in 2000, despite a six-year statute of limitations on such claims. He relied on discredited studies that have since been retracted by their publisher. And he relied on testimony from a “doctor” who isn’t actually a physician at all.

Then his decision was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court dominated by MAGA Republicans, which narrowed Kacsmaryk’s decision but still effectively banned the drug. It was this decision by the Fifth Circuit that a unanimous Supreme Court reversed on Thursday.”

https://www.vox.com/scotus/355175/supreme-court-mifepristone-abortion-alliiance-hippocratic-medicine-fda