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The Worst Trump Judge In America Is...
Brantley Starr, Northern District of TexasBalls & Strikes
The Résumé
Brantley Starr came up in Texas, graduating from a Christian college in Abilene and the University of Texas School of Law, where he joined (drumroll please) the local chapter of the Federalist Society. Don’t let the fact that a sitting federal judge is named “Brantley” distract you from his last name: He is the nephew of Ken Starr, the former special counsel who worked alongside Brett Kavanaugh to breathlessly report on the sexual misconduct of President Bill Clinton, and then, as president of Baylor University, utterly failed to protect Baylor University’s students from sexual assault. (Kavanaugh, to the best of my knowledge, was uninvolved in that chapter of Starr’s career.)
Ken Starr’s uncle magic and connections to powerful Republicans in the conservative legal movement paid off for young Brantley. After graduation, he was able to spend nearly his entire career in the soft embrace of right-wing state government offices: He worked for two different Texas Supreme Court justices (including The Posting Justice, Don Willett, whom Trump later put on the Fifth Circuit) and worked his way through the ranks of the Texas Attorney General’s office. That’s where Brantley was when Trump appointed him to serve on the District Court for the Northern District of Texas in 2019.
The Opinions
The Northern District of Texas is a premiere venue for judge-shopping, which is when parties try to file cases in specific courts to get their preferred judge. That’s because this particular court, unlike most federal courts, assigns judges to specific geographic areas. For example, nearly all cases in Amarillo are assigned to Matthew Kacsmaryk, an anti-abortion crusader whose decision “suspending” FDA approval of a drug commonly used in medication abortion was recently upheld in part by the Fifth Circuit. About half of all cases in Fort Worth are assigned to Reed O’Connor, who has repealed Obamacare from the bench an estimated 7,000 times, only to be overruled by the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court.
Unlike those lucky judges, Brantley was assigned to Dallas, where he only has a 1-in-8 chance of getting assigned any given case. This means that when he gets the type of culture war-adjacent case that Trump judges crave, he really needs to let his freak flag fly to stand out. For example, in a case from earlier this year, a Texas company fired an executive after he refused on religious grounds to get the COVID-19 vaccine. After the executive was hired by a company in the same field, his old company sued to enforce his non-compete agreement.
Non-competes are increasingly controversial, and Texas law allows judges to refuse to enforce them in many cases, which is what Brantley did—but only after starting his opinion with a rant about the mistreatment of religious Americans at the hands of heathens everywhere. “At a legal conference three years ago, a professor pulled me aside,” he wrote. “He confided that he was an atheist, he knew I believed in God, but he wanted to apologize for the treatment people of faith in America are receiving.”
The Northern District of Texas is a premiere venue for judge-shopping, which is when parties try to file cases in specific courts to get their preferred judge. That’s because this particular court, unlike most federal courts, assigns judges to specific geographic areas. For example, nearly all cases in Amarillo are assigned to Matthew Kacsmaryk, an anti-abortion crusader whose decision “suspending” FDA approval of a drug commonly used in medication abortion was recently upheld in part by the Fifth Circuit. About half of all cases in Fort Worth are assigned to Reed O’Connor, who has repealed Obamacare from the bench an estimated 7,000 times, only to be overruled by the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court.
Unlike those lucky judges, Brantley was assigned to Dallas, where he only has a 1-in-8 chance of getting assigned any given case. This means that when he gets the type of culture war-adjacent case that Trump judges crave, he really needs to let his freak flag fly to stand out. For example, in a case from earlier this year, a Texas company fired an executive after he refused on religious grounds to get the COVID-19 vaccine. After the executive was hired by a company in the same field, his old company sued to enforce his non-compete agreement.
Non-competes are increasingly controversial, and Texas law allows judges to refuse to enforce them in many cases, which is what Brantley did—but only after starting his opinion with a rant about the mistreatment of religious Americans at the hands of heathens everywhere. “At a legal conference three years ago, a professor pulled me aside,” he wrote. “He confided that he was an atheist, he knew I believed in God, but he wanted to apologize for the treatment people of faith in America are receiving.”
Link to tweet