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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

Meta paying $175M would produce much needed schadenfreude.

However it's worth mentioning that this case appeared before the notoriously patent-troll-friendly Judge Alan D. Albright. The man actually openly encouraged patent owners to appear before him, and senators have asked the Supreme Court to reprimand him (the Chief Justice has since criticized him). The Albright situation is so bad that the Western District recently had to introduce a forced case randomization in order to keep plaintiffs from shopping for him. I'd say the chance this was overturned on appeal would be high.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/t...

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although the case was initially handled by Judge Albright in Waco, the case was transferred in November 2021 to the Austin division and Judge Yeakel, who handled the case thereafter (including at the jury verdict stage).

Can someone who knows about US law explain why it's easier to change procedure and introduce case randomization than to simply sack the judge for handling cases in an obviously biased way?

I am not a lawyer, but am a US citizen.

A central design goal of the US system is to prevent any one person or group from getting too much power. Judges in particular were seen by the Founders as an important check on the power of the legislative and executive branches of government, so those 2 branches probably simply do not have the power to remove the judge. Other judges, perhaps on the Supreme Court, might have the power to remove the judge, but only for breaches of ethical standards.

A judge can be removed from cases. But they continue to get a salary and benefits until impeached.

Practically it’s easier to force a resignation than impeach.

I'm far from an expert, but on a cursory search it looks like federal judges can only be removed by congressional impeachment, which would be extremely hard to pull off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_judge#Te...

AFAIK, judges can't be "fired" in the traditional sense. If they are going to be removed, they need Congress to impeach the judge in question.

As we saw with the Trump impeachment, getting a 2/3 vote in the Senate is exceedingly difficult.

It's the same reason a jury cannot be punished for giving the "wrong" decision. Otherwise you can influence the jury/judge.

In both cases, appeals are the accepted method to solve the issue.

Judges are elected or appointed, they can't be directly fired, and it would take the federal government to call for impeachment. This is a non-trivial matter, and the fallout would require a special appointment, or special election.

To institute a policy that increases fairness of the whole system instead of targeting a specific individual makes sense. After all there is nothing to say that someone else (or several someones) wouldn't have the same issue.

This solves the problem, without having to literally make it an act of congress.

You can't sack federal judges, they're subject to the same removal process as the president: 1/2 the house has to vote to impeach, then 2/3 of the Senate has to vote to convict.

It happens, but generally for criminal reasons: https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/impeachments-federal-judg...

Caveat Lector: Not a lawyer.

This man is a federal district judge, who's appointment and removal are governed by Article 2 of the Constitution. Specifically, he must be nominated by the president, and confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime term. While he converts to senior status at some point, that doesn't change much in his case*. To remove him, you must have the House of Representative pass a bill of impeachment, the senate must hold an impeachment hearing, and 60 senators must vote in favor. That bars him from all federal service.

To change local district procedure, the Chief Judge can simply make it so. A lot easier than getting Senators to agree on something. One guy who's under a lot of outside pressure (from appeals courts and potentially the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who senators were asking to look into the issue) is highly motivated to fix a problem in his house, so to speak.

Unrelated to the message of your comment, but where on earth do people learn phrases such as 'Caveat Lector'?

Honestly I see things like this on Hacker News all the time, some obscure (to me) latin phrase that I've never seen outside of these message boards. Is there some specific body of literature that sprinkles latin phrases in otherwise common english text?

> recently had to introduce a forced case randomization in order to keep plaintiffs from shopping for him

I thought all U.S. District Courts had random assignment of cases to judges?

He's the only district judge in the Waco Division, so if you applied there, you'd get him.

Oh, so I guess they didn't have random assignment across divisions (which maybe some districts do and other districts don't?).

I'm completely clueless on the court process. Wouldn't that mean that, depending on who you got, you might have to travel an absurd distance just to get your court case heard? It's good to help fight patent trolls, but it sounds like it puts a lot of burden on the sincere cases.

Indeed, my company had a case in front of him, and like most companies do, we settled because it was cheaper than taking it to trial.

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