PICK YOUR JUDGE, PICK YOUR COUNTRY: THE ONE-COURTHOUSE LOOPHOLE

FACT: There are 677 authorised federal district judgeships in the United States. Under the right conditions, a litigant can arrange for a specific one of them to decide the fate of a national policy — and can know which one before filing a single page.

The mechanism is mundane, which is why it survived so long. Federal districts are carved into divisions, and in a handful of them exactly one judge sits. File your case in that division and you have not selected a court; you have selected a judge, by name, in advance. Ask that judge for a nationwide injunction and one person’s ruling — from a courthouse most Americans could not find on a map — governs everyone until an appeals court says otherwise, which can take a year.

This is not a partisan technique, whatever the current examples suggest. Both sides have used it, both sides have complained about it while using it, and the divisions themselves were drawn for the entirely innocent reason that rural litigants should not have to drive four hours to file a form.

The judiciary did notice. In March 2024 the Judicial Conference — the federal courts’ own policymaking body — adopted a policy that cases seeking to block or compel state or federal action should be assigned by district-wide random selection rather than by the division where they were filed. Ninety-four district courts already worked that way. The policy simply asked the rest to join them.

Then came the part that matters. Within weeks, after political objections, the judiciary clarified that the policy was guidance — advisory, not binding, with each district free to adopt it, modify it, or ignore it entirely. And the policy would not have stopped a single-judge division from issuing a nationwide injunction anyway; it only changed which judge drew the case.

A courthouse where only one judge sits is not a venue. It is a selection.

OPINION: Consider what it means that the fix here required no legislation, no constitutional amendment, and no cooperation from Congress. The federal judiciary could have closed this itself, with a rule, at any time. It drafted exactly that rule — and then, under pressure, downgraded it to a recommendation that the districts most implicated are the least likely to follow.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the same pattern as the ethics code: an institution presented with a self-inflicted problem, writing a solution, and then removing the part that would have made it work. A judiciary that will not bind itself is asking the other two branches to do it — which returns the question, as ever, to who you send there.