You may not pick the judge, but you can pick the district. Also not every case filed will go all of the way through to a decision, so you can file multiple cases then actually litigate the one that wound up in front of the judge that you want. (There are safeguards against that. They are imperfect...)
Furthermore while in theory judges have to follow precedent and case law, in practice there are lots of cases where well-meaning and dedicated judges, presented with the same facts, precedent, and case law, will come to opposite conclusion. Were it otherwise, the Supreme Court would never have dissenting opinions.
Finally, courts do have the right to request that the arguments that they wish to hear about particular points of law be made in front of them. For example in proposition 8, the justices required that the standing argument be made, even though neither side wanted to advance it. In the Affordable Healthcare Act this went further. An attorney, Robert Long, wound up having to be appointed specifically to make the case to the Supreme Court for a point that neither side wished to argue. That point being that the law was a tax, and therefore under the Anti-Injunction Act no lawsuit could be brought about it until after someone had been injured by actually paying it.
That last point matters in this case. The state actively did not want to defend this case in front of the district court. The judge wanted it defended. That is how a different set of attorneys got involved in the first place.
Comments
You may not pick the judge, but you can pick the district. Also not every case filed will go all of the way through to a decision, so you can file multiple cases then actually litigate the one that wound up in front of the judge that you want. (There are safeguards against that. They are imperfect...)
Furthermore while in theory judges have to follow precedent and case law, in practice there are lots of cases where well-meaning and dedicated judges, presented with the same facts, precedent, and case law, will come to opposite conclusion. Were it otherwise, the Supreme Court would never have dissenting opinions.
Finally, courts do have the right to request that the arguments that they wish to hear about particular points of law be made in front of them. For example in proposition 8, the justices required that the standing argument be made, even though neither side wanted to advance it. In the Affordable Healthcare Act this went further. An attorney, Robert Long, wound up having to be appointed specifically to make the case to the Supreme Court for a point that neither side wished to argue. That point being that the law was a tax, and therefore under the Anti-Injunction Act no lawsuit could be brought about it until after someone had been injured by actually paying it.
That last point matters in this case. The state actively did not want to defend this case in front of the district court. The judge wanted it defended. That is how a different set of attorneys got involved in the first place.