LGBTQ rights lawyers face potential sanctions over Alabama ‘judge shopping’

Eleven attorneys at major LGBTQ rights groups and law firms engaged in impermissible judge-shopping to steer litigation challenging Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth away from a conservative judge, a three-judge panel concluded in a newly unsealed report.

U.S. District Judge Liles Burke, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump in Montgomery, unsealed the report on Tuesday and directed a group of attorneys and plaintiffs in the litigation to explain why he should not sanction them.

The 50-page report was prompted by Burke’s concerns that the lawyers had dropped two separate cases over the Republican-led state’s law after they were assigned to him, only to announce they planned to re-file a challenge.

The panel’s report, by three judges from each of Alabama’s district courts tasked with investigating the matter, concluded the lawyers “purposefully attempted to circumvent the random case assignment procedures” for the U.S. District Courts for the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama.

It said they did so because they viewed Burke, a conservative judge, as a “bad draw” who likely would rule against them. He did not, however, and enjoined the law’s enforcement, though the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in August.

The lawyers include LGBTQ rights advocates such as Carl Charles, who recently left Lambda Legal to join the U.S. Department of Justice; James Esseks of the American Civil Liberties Union; Jennifer Levi of GLAD; and Shannon Minter and Asaf Orr of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Others worked at three law firms who litigated the cases pro bono: Melody Eagan of Jeffrey Doss of Lightfoot, Franklin & White; Michael Shortnacy, who was at King