Texas Brine Company, LLC, et al. v. Rodd Naquin, Clerk, Court of Appeal of Louisiana, First Circuit

Appellate courts in this country generally decide cases in panels, often made up of three judges, selected from the membership of the court as a whole. Different courts thus devise different internal procedures to assign cases to particular panels. In the course of the sprawling litigation below, petitioners came to find that the intermediate appellate court handling hundreds of their related interlocutory writs and appeals was not constituting its panels randomly, as state law requires. See La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 2164.1; La. Rev. Stat. § 13:319. Instead, the court secretly maintained a non-random procedure in which judges were assigned to panels on a geographical basis, privileging certain Louisiana parishes over others—a procedure that the court has only now acknowledged. The question presented is whether due process requires judges to be assigned to panels randomly from the pool of all the judges available to hear a particular case.