New policy could restrict ‘judge shopping’ throughout the entire country

Federal courts moved Tuesday to make it harder to file lawsuits in front of judges seen as friendly to a point of view, a practice known as judge shopping that gained national attention in a major abortion medication case.The new policy covers civil suits that would affect an entire state or the whole country. It would require a judge to be randomly assigned, even in areas where locally filed cases have gone before a single judge.Cases are already assigned at random under plans in most of the country’s 94 federal district courts, but some plans assign cases to judges in the smaller…