Miserable Trump-appointed judge abruptly resigns - and leaves huge workload behind: report
Source: Raw Story
April 27, 2026 7:33PM ET
U.S. District Judge Alan Albright abruptly announced his resignation this month, leaving his colleagues with a huge stack of unresolved casework and it may be because he was simply miserable in his role as a judge, Ryan Autullo of Bloomberg Law reported on Monday.
Albright, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2018, will be leaving in August. "US Judge Alan Albright gave signs he wasn't enjoying the job before his surprise resignation last week," Autullo wrote in a post to X promoting the story. "From a big case backlog to holding hearings virtually to farming out his docket to a Magistrate, Albright was over it."
"The Western District of Texas had 129 civil cases pending for three years or longer, as of last September, and 70% belonged to Albright. He also accounted for 63% of the 706 civil motions that were ripe for a decision for six months or longer but hadnt been resolved," said the report. "Albright had 446 undecided motions as of September 2025, nearly twice that of any other district judge in the three states that make up the Fifth Circuit. Albrights judicial colleagues in Austin, Robert Pitman and David Ezra, had none."
He has a huge docket that now the other judges are going to have, because its not going to go down appreciably by the end of August, no matter how hard he works, former Texas-based U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel told Bloomberg Law.
Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/alan-albright/
Link to REPORT - Albright Leaves Hundreds of Cases for Busy Colleagues to Finish
StoolPigeon
(272 posts)$50 and time served.
BumRushDaShow
(171,204 posts)
niyad
(133,443 posts)3Hotdogs
(15,469 posts)Joseph Force Crater, N.Y., 1930. - - For those of yiz that weren't listening to Walter Winchell back then.
niyad
(133,443 posts)niyad
(133,443 posts)2naSalit
(103,628 posts)His appointment and his leaving.
niyad
(133,443 posts)Buddyzbuddy
(2,770 posts)Only the best people. Riiiight!
niyad
(133,443 posts)of the unqualified and incompetent, an apparently unlimited supply.
onenote
(46,199 posts)He had served 7 years as a magistrate judge before being nominated to the District Court and his nomination sailed through committee and the floor on voice votes, with no objections.
LeftInTX
(34,696 posts)Controversy
After Albright encouraged patent owners to file claims in the Western District of Texas, one fifth of the nation's patent cases were filed in the district.[11] On September 24, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rebuked Albright for refusing to follow the law limiting federal judges from retaining cases that should be transferred to another jurisdiction.[12] On October 21, 2021, the Federal Circuit issued a writ of mandamus transferring another patent case that Judge Albright oversaw because of his prior denial of transfer. The Federal Circuit's opinion rebuked Albright's continuous denial of transfers from the Western District.[13]
Due to Albright's actions, on November 2, 2021, Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy wrote a bipartisan letter asking Chief Justice John G. Roberts to direct the Judicial Conference of the United States to "conduct a study of actual and potential abuses" that result from an "absence of adequate rules regulating judicial assignment and venue for patent cases within a [single judicial] district.".[14][15] The letter criticized Albright for having "openly solicited cases at lawyers' meetings" and for having "repeatedly ignored binding case law and abused his discretion," noting that Albright's decisions "resulted in a flood of mandamus petitions" being filed and granted "no fewer than 15 times in just the past two years.".[15]
Judicial Reassignment Order for Patent Cases
Because Albright is the only district judge in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas, any patent cases filed in Waco were guaranteed to be assigned to him. This effectively gave plaintiffs the power to choose the judge to whom their cases were assigned by filing in the Waco Division, resulting in a disproportionately large number of patent cases being heard by Albright. Faced with mounting criticism from scholars, U.S. Senators, and the Chief Justice of the United States, on July 25, 2022, Chief Judge Orlando Garcia stripped Albright of automatic assignment of new patent cases filed in the Waco Division.[16] The reassignment order states that to "equitably distribute" patent cases, any new patent cases filed in the Waco Division on or after July 25, 2022, would be randomly assigned among twelve of the judges of the Western District of Texas, reducing Albright's case load to approximately 8% of new patent cases filed in Waco. The order only impacts judicial assignment of cases filed in the Waco Division, and only affects patent cases. Chief Judge Garcia's order is widely viewed by practitioners as signaling the demise of the Western District of Texas as a major venue for patent litigation.[17]
littlemissmartypants
(34,182 posts)wolfie001
(7,864 posts)multigraincracker
(37,880 posts)LiberalLovinLug
(14,723 posts)purr-rat beauty
(1,341 posts)Who should also be demoted in The Guard
What a despicable thing