Three left-wing lawyers received a devastating, official reprimand earlier this year, after a years-long investigation by the federal court system into an instance of improper judge-shopping.
The case began in 2022, when a coalition of left-wing lawyers pulled a lawsuit shell game on the federal court system, trying to induce an injunction against an Alabama law protecting minors from gender transition procedures by landing a sympathetic judge. Not only did their lawsuit ultimately fail, but now their deceptive tactics have come home to roost.
“No case is worth the price of one’s integrity; and yet Melody Eagan, Jeffrey Doss, and Carl Charles chose to gamble with theirs,” wrote a furious Judge Liles Burke, a Trump appointee in the Northern District of Alabama.
Shortly after the Alabama legislature passed the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection (VCAP) Act in May 2022, a coalition of left-wing lawyers filed two lawsuits (known as Walker and Ladinsky) in separate federal districts in the state, challenging the law’s constitutionality.
When the federal court’s random assignment process consolidated these cases and placed them before a Trump-appointed judge, the attorneys believed they faced an uphill battle.
So, instead of preparing a decent brief and marshalling their best arguments, they opted instead for a procedural maneuver known as judge-shopping. They voluntarily dropped both cases, then refiled another case (known as Eknes-Tucker) with a different lead plaintiff but substantially the same arguments.
But the federal court system saw through this ploy and steered the new case right back to the judge they tried to avoid, Judge Burke. Ironically, Burke granted them the preliminary injunction they sought, and he was the only judge to do so. Alabama appealed, winning before a panel of the Eleventh Circuit and the full Eleventh Circuit, before the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti verdict forced the lawyers to drop their case.
Conduct not forgotten
In the meantime, however, Burke was highly disturbed by the maneuver, and he referred the legal teams for judge-shopping. The investigation was overseen by a three-judge panel, with one drawn from each of Alabama’s federal districts. On October 27, 2023, the panel produced a 53-page decision, finding “without hesitation” that 11 of the left-wing lawyers involved had “purposefully attempted to circumvent the random case assignment procedures of the United States District Courts.”
Burke then ordered the 11 lawyers to “show cause” why they should not be sanctioned for judge-shopping. “Judge-shopping is an affront to the rule of law,” he wrote in a final order on February 25, 2025. “It erodes public confidence in judicial impartiality, burdens courts with procedural glut, and casts unwarranted suspicion on judges and case assignments alike. In short, it poses an intolerable threat to the fair and orderly administration of justice.”
Most of the lawyers apologized, and Burke accepted their apology as sufficient discipline. But Burke found the apologies from three of the lawyers to be insincere, or non-apologies. “Some of the Respondents have now learned this lesson; others have not,” he wrote. “Most have accepted responsibility for their misconduct, shown genuine contrition for their misconduct, and require no further discipline. But the rest have not only refused to accept responsibility or apologize sincerely for their actions; they’ve also tried to shift the blame for their misconduct to the judiciary.”
“In both form and substance,” he explained, Eagan’s “apology evinced no remorse for her underlying conduct.” Likewise, “Doss’s greatest regret was to have been publicly embarrassed by the negative attention; in both form and substance, his apology showed no remorse for his underlying conduct.” Both Birmingham-based lawyers were at the center of the activity to file and re-file a lawsuit.
In addition, Burke found that Charles “intentionally misrepresented or otherwise failed to disclose key facts to the Panel by testifying falsely” in four separate answers, related to his role in calling the judge’s chambers to seek non-public information about assignment of the case. “Charles showed absolutely no remorse for testifying falsely,” Burke concluded, and “Charles’s apology simply parroted the key points of his legal defense. … There was nothing in his tone, his wording, or his demeanor to suggest soul-searching, sincere regret, or any sort of personal reckoning; indeed, it was delivered as if by rote.”
As a result, Burke ordered, “The Court PUBLICLY REPRIMANDS Melody Eagan, Jeffrey Doss, and Carl Charles for the bad-faith misconduct described in this order” (capitalization in the original).
“To effectuate their public reprimand,” he continued, “the Court ORDERS as follows: In every pending state or federal case in which they are counsel of record, Eagan and Doss shall provide a copy of this order to their clients, opposing counsel, and the judge presiding over the matter. Eagan and Doss shall also provide a copy of this order to every attorney in their law firm.”
He issued similar orders for Charles (who had taken a position with the Biden Department of Justice while under investigation), “In every pending state or federal case in which he is counsel of record, Charles shall provide a copy of this order to his clients, opposing counsel, and the judge presiding over the matter. In the event Charles is still employed by the U.S. Department of Justice, Charles must notify the U.S. Attorney General of this order. In the event he has entered private practice, he must provide a copy of this order to every attorney in his law firm.”
Burke also fined Charles $5,000 and referred “this matter to the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama to investigate whether Carl Charles has engaged in any criminal conduct.” He also directed copies of the order to be sent to the state bar counsels of Alabama, Massachusetts, New York, and Georgia, where the three lawyers were licensed to practice.
Reckoning made public
Burke’s February order was unsealed in September, when federal prosecutors followed through on the referral and charged Charles with making a false statement under oath, a felony.
Burke concluded with frustration that the judge-shopping investigation had dragged on so long. “The Court strove from the first to bring these proceedings to a swift close,” he said. “But where the Court sought resolution, it met with obstruction; where it asked for compliance, it met with defiance; and where it expected decorum, it met with contempt.”
Perhaps more than anything, this defiance and contempt by left-wing lawyers explains why the federal court system had to investigate and reprimand them for judge-shopping in the first place.
This column first appeared in The Washington Stand.
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