Advocacy groups push for end of 'judge shopping,' courts to allow limited remote audio access, a shorter bar exam, and gun-wielding judge ??

?? Good morning from The Legal File! Here are today's top legal stories:

?? Civil rights, abortion groups urge US judiciary to end 'judge shopping'

The federal judiciary is facing new calls from civil rights, abortion, and immigration advocates to end the practice of "judge shopping " by state attorneys general and activists who sue over government policies in courthouses where a single judge seen as likely sympathetic to their cases is almost guaranteed to hear their lawsuits.

Nine groups led by the National Immigration Law Center in letters to the chief judges of Texas' four federal district courts, where many Biden administration policies have been challenged, asked them to amend local rules to ensure certain cases are not assigned to the judge in the courthouse a case was filed in.

The rules in Texas' federal districts virtually guarantee civil cases in single-judge divisions will be assigned to those lone judges, short-circuiting the typical presumption that cases filed in federal court will be assigned a random judge.

The groups' proposals add to calls by?Democratic lawmakers ?and the?American Bar Association ?for the judiciary to eliminate case assignment mechanisms that allow litigants to effectively choose their judges in cases challenging government policies. The Biden administration has?also raised concerns.

??? US federal courts to allow limited remote audio access post-pandemic

Federal courts will allow remote public access to civil and bankruptcy proceedings to continue as they did during the COVID pandemic, but with new restrictions adopted that only allow for audio broadcasting when no witnesses are testifying.

The new policy adopted by the U.S. Judicial Conference fell short of calls by lawmakers and advocates to go further in allowing remote public access to other court proceedings, including former President Donald Trump's criminal trials.

But it goes beyond what the judiciary had generally allowed before March 2020, when the onset of the COVID pandemic forced courts to go virtual and relax a broadcasting ban in district courts in the face of lockdowns intended to reduce the spread of the virus.

Remote access to criminal proceedings was also allowed under authority granted to the judiciary by the emergency relief law the CARES Act.That?expired in May ?when the Biden administration allowed national emergency declarations to end.

"The consensus among the conference was to return to what had been our status quo with an improvement on it or at least a modification of it," U.S. Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith, the chair of the Judicial Conference's executive committee said during a press conference.

??? New bar exam shaves three hours off testing time

The new bar exam set to debut in July 2026 will be about three hours shorter than the current one.

The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which is now designing and pilot testing the NextGen Bar Exam, said that it will be a nine-hour test administered over the course of one-and-a-half days. By contrast, the existing Uniform Bar Exam used by 41 jurisdictions is about 12 hours long over two days.

The NextGen exam will have two three-hour sessions on day one, followed by one three-hour session on day two. Using a mixture of different question types within testing sessions and adding question types that “allow us to measure knowledge and skills more precisely,” will make the new exam more efficient, said Andreas Oranje, the national conference’s managing director of assessment programs, in an announcement.

Shortening the exam is a positive change for test-takers, said bar exam tutor Sean Silverman.

“In fact, fatigue is more of a confounding variable, and so a shorter exam improves validity,” he added.

While the NextGen exam will begin in July of 2026, the National Conference will offer jurisdictions a choice between the new and existing exam through July 2027. After that, it will only produce the NextGen test.

?? Gun-wielding judge fights to stay on bench in New York court

The New York Court of Appeals weighed whether to remove Whitehall village Justice Robert Putorti who brandished his loaded gun at a defendant in his courtroom in 2015.

The judges on New York's highest state court pressed a lawyer for Putorti why his conduct, and possibly racist stereotypes he used when describing the incident, should not be grounds for removal from the bench.

"He's a judge. We're supposed to be looking at him as a judge," Judge Shirley Troutman said. "We have to conduct ourselves in a certain manner," Troutman added.

Putorti's lawyer, Nathaniel Riley of Cerio Law Offices, argued that his client felt a subjective fear when criminal defendant Brandon Wood approached the bench quickly in late 2015, prompting Putorti to draw a loaded semi-automatic handgun on Wood.

Ten of the 11 members of the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct recommended Putorti's removal in a 2022 determination.

?? That's all for today, thank you for reading?The Legal File!

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