Some believe the writings of impeached U.S. District Judge Samuel B. Kent, Southern District of Texas, are quite funny, but probably not many lawyers in Galveston were laughing after his June 2001 order on a motion to transfer for improper venue. Being Juge Kent, he couldn’t just deny the motion. He had to rip apart the lawyer who filed the motion:
[A]ny person with even a correspondence-course level understanding of federal practice and procedure would recognize that Defendant’s Motion is patently insipid, ludicrous and utterly unequivocally without any merit whatsoever. Worse, it is just plain blatantly wrong in light of the unambiguous language of a decades old federal statute and veritable mountains of case law addressing venue propriety.
Sound bad? It gets worse. Judge Kent went on to state that “Defendant’s obnoxiously ancient, boilerplate, inane Motion is emphatically DENIED.”
For the coup de grace, Judge Kent ended by disqualifying the lawyer from further appearing in the case “for submitting this asinine tripe.”
— Labor Force, Inc. v. Jacintoport Corp., 144 F. Supp. 2d 740 (S.D. Tex. 2001) (opinion subsequently withdrawn from bound volume).
Leave a Reply