Texas accused of judge shopping, SCOTUS weighs student debt relief, Steptoe & Johnson’s revenue, and were firms that topped the ISS charts overpaid?
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For the third time this year, the Biden administration is accusing Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton of "judge shopping" and is asking U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix in Paxton's state to let someone else hear a case he filed challenging government policies.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday asked Hendrix, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump in Lubbock, to transfer a lawsuit by Paxton claiming last year's $1.7 trillion federal government funding law was unlawful.
Paxton has often sued the Biden administration in the state's smaller cities like Lubbock, Amarillo, and Victoria, where local orders assign most cases to a Trump-appointed judge.
A case pitting Texas against the federal government either belonged before a judge in the state capital of Austin or a judge in Washington, D.C., the Department of Justice argued.
The Justice Department also requested to transfer two other Paxton-led cases before Trump-appointed judges, starting with one challenging a Biden immigration policy and the other that seeks to block Biden's ESG investment rule.
The skepticism expressed by conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices during arguments on Tuesday over President Joe Biden's move to forgive $430 billion in student debt not only cast doubt on the plan's fate but also signaled trouble ahead for the use of executive power to get things done in his remaining time in office.
The court is due to rule by the end of June on the legality of the debt relief, which the administration argued was lawful under authority given to the executive branch by the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act of 2003.
Policies involving a lot of money and generating a lot of political controversy might be "something for Congress to act on," Chief Justice John Roberts said during Tuesday's arguments.
"And if they haven't acted on it, then maybe that's a good lesson to say for the president or the administrative bureaucracy that maybe that's not something they should undertake on their own," Roberts said.
More from the U.S. Supreme court:
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Washington, D.C.-founded law firm Steptoe & Johnson on Wednesday said its revenue increased by 3% to $434.6 million in 2022, a slowdown from its growth in 2021 but still record receipts for the firm.
Steptoe chair Gwen Renigar attributed the growth in part to the firm's government-facing practices, noting that the firm advised clients on how to navigate sanctions the U.S. and other Western countries leveled against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
The firm said that Steptoe lawyers were also pressed into service by companies and trade associations to advocate for certain provisions in the $52.7 billion semiconductor chips manufacturing subsidy and research law the U.S. passed last year.
In June, the firm said it would cut pay and hours for associates who were not meeting billable hour goals.
Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Bernstein Litowitz Berger topped the newly released 2022 league table from ISS Securities Class Action Services. The firms were at the top of last year's ISS chart — and the charts from the two previous years as well.
In fact, these firms have occupied the top two slots on the ISS chart of total settlement values for nine of the last 10 years.
A study by law professors found that Robbins Geller garnered more than $1.6 billion in fees and Bernstein Litowitz earned an estimated $1.3 billion, noting that the firms attained their outsized success because of their client relationships with the institutional investors often selected to serve as lead plaintiffs in shareholder class actions.
“As the settlements get larger, judges are willing to give plaintiffs’ firms a larger return on the time they invested,†the study noted.
In her latest column, Alison Frankel writes that the study's most provocative assertion is that judges may be overpaying shareholder firms in the biggest cases, awarding fees in excess of the risk the firms bear.
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