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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 21, 2026

Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published an investigation revealing that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed at least 30 lawsuits over nine years in counties with tenuous connections to the alleged violations—a practice he publicly opposed in a 2017 Supreme Court brief where he urged cracking down on forum shopping. The investigation identified cases including a Tylenol lawsuit and a Meta lawsuit ($1.4 billion settlement) filed in Harrison County despite Meta's primary operations being in Travis County.

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Texas's attorney general built his reputation attacking lawyers who shop for friendly courts. Does it undermine that credibility if he's now accused of doing the same thing to win high-stakes cases?

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Paxton's 2017 brief as binding standard
Liberal
Ken Paxton told the Supreme Court in 2017 that forum shopping 'reduces confidence in the fairness and neutrality of our Nation's justice system.' He signed that brief. Those aren't abstract principles — they're his own words defining what corrupts judicial legitimacy. The question is simple: why doesn't that standard apply to him?
Conservative
Because there's a difference between warning against a *pattern* of abuse by plaintiff lawyers with no institutional accountability and an attorney general making individual venue decisions within prosecutorial discretion. Paxton's brief was about systemic gaming — trial lawyers filing 500 cases in the same county to stack odds. One case in Harrison, even if aggressive, isn't the corruption he warned against.
Liberal
But it's not one case — it's thirty over nine years. That's the pattern you're dismissing. And you're redefining his own standard to exempt state actors, which is exactly the selective application of principle he accused others of doing.
Conservative
The comparison fails because state actors have democratic accountability through elections and oversight that private trial lawyers don't. That creates a structural difference that justifies different treatment under rule of law.
Harrison County's actual connection to Meta
Liberal
Meta's primary Texas operations are in Travis County — that's where the company maintains its largest presence, its data centers, its actual business footprint in the state. Filing in Harrison, which has 0.2% of Texas's population, isn't a close call between two reasonable venues. It's a deliberate bypass of the county where the case naturally belongs.
Conservative
But 'naturally belongs' is doing a lot of work there. Meta operated servers throughout Texas, had employees across the state, and its alleged violations of Texas consumer law affected people statewide. Those facts support venue in multiple counties, which is precisely why the court accepted jurisdiction. The statute requires a 'substantial' connection, not the single best venue.
Liberal
You're describing a lock the locksmith can pick. Yes, 'substantial' gives some play — that's why Paxton could file in thirty different counties. But the Legislature didn't write that statute to let prosecutors choose whichever county felt friendliest. They wrote it to require genuine nexus.
Conservative
If the Legislature wanted to ban multi-county venue, they would have. The statute's text allows it, courts accepted it, and calling that selective interpretation doesn't change what the law actually says.
Settlement success as vindication
Liberal
You mention the $1.4 billion recovery. That's real money for real harm — Meta violated Texas privacy law. But the settlement doesn't prove the venue was proper; it explains why the venue was chosen. Paxton picked Harrison precisely because he expected a favorable outcome. The money proves the incentive structure works, not that the procedure was legitimate.
Conservative
That's backwards. If the venue was improper, a court should have dismissed it. They didn't. Meta didn't appeal the venue ruling — they settled. When both parties accept jurisdiction and a defendant chooses settlement over litigation, that's evidence the venue decision cleared legal review, not proof of hidden corruption.
Liberal
Meta settled because they faced litigation in a hostile forum chosen for that exact reason. That's leverage, not legitimacy. And defendants often settle questionable venue rather than litigate venue in an already-unfavorable location.
Conservative
So the standard becomes: if the outcome is big enough, the venue must have been chosen illegally? That inverts presumptions of regularity and turns results into retroactive grounds for invalidating prosecutorial judgment.
Democratic accountability as structural difference
Liberal
You've argued state actors have electoral accountability, so different standards apply. But that accountability is meaningless if Paxton uses the machinery of courts to generate settlements that look like legal victories but are actually venue windfalls. Voters can't correct what the courts legitimized, and the 2017 brief shows Paxton knew exactly how that machinery corrupts outcomes.
Conservative
Elections do constrain behavior in ways that private lawyers face — voters punish overreach. But you're also claiming that any favorable settlement proves corruption, which conflates outcome with process. Paxton could be right about the merits *and* wrong about venue. Democracy works through elections; it doesn't work through retroactive invalidation of litigation choices because you dislike the results.
Liberal
The point isn't that he should lose elections — it's that he shouldn't be rewarded for ignoring his own published standard. Voters judging his record see a $1.4 billion win; they don't see the venue manipulation because his 2017 brief is gathering dust.
Conservative
Then make that case to voters. But don't pretend a court's acceptance of jurisdiction, a defendant's settlement choice, and prosecutorial discretion all point to hidden corruption when the actual legal record shows legitimate process.
Pattern versus individual aggressive choice
Liberal
Thirty lawsuits in nine years across tenuous county connections isn't a rounding error. It's a pattern showing institutional choice, not coincidence. When the state's chief law enforcement officer files repeatedly in friendly venues after writing a brief against that exact practice, that's not a few borderline calls — it's a strategy he perfected after warning others against it.
Conservative
Thirty cases could also mean he's aggressively pursuing violations across a large state — which is what attorneys general do. You're treating frequency as proof of intentionality without showing that each venue choice was actually improper under the statute. A pattern of aggressive litigation isn't the same as a pattern of illegal venue.
Liberal
But Paxton himself defined what makes venue choices suspect: they corrode public confidence in judicial fairness when plaintiffs game selection. He applied that lens to others' behavior. The pattern shows he's doing exactly what he warned against.
Conservative
You're assuming the standard applies identically to state prosecutors and private plaintiffs, which ignores why venue rules exist differently for them — prosecutorial discretion and electoral accountability create different constraints than those on trial lawyers operating for profit.
Hypocrisy's cascade effect on conservative institutions
Liberal
Here's what happens next: every Democratic attorney general watches Paxton file in friendly counties, sees him vindicate the strategy with settlements, and says 'if Texas does it, we can file our climate litigation in blue counties, our gun-safety cases in anti-NRA jurisdictions.' The conservative legal movement spent thirty years building a venue-reform argument that applied equally to everyone. Paxton just handed that argument to the other side as permission.
Conservative
That assumes Democratic AGs will face no accountability and courts will accept any venue claim, which isn't necessarily true. Federal courts already police venue more carefully than Texas does, and if there's a cascade problem, the solution is stronger judicial gatekeeping — not a retroactive standard that invalidates Paxton's prior wins based on selective principle.
Liberal
You're betting courts will police the next guy. But courts already accepted Paxton's venues. The precedent is set. The permission slip is written.
Conservative
Then the fight is in the courts and legislatures, not in rewriting Paxton's past cases to fit a narrative about hypocrisy. If venue standards need tightening, do it prospectively — don't invent violations after the fact because the ideology cuts the wrong direction.
Conservative's hardest question
The Meta settlement produced $1.4 billion in recovery for Texans on a genuine privacy violation, and a court did not dismiss the Harrison County venue — which means a reasonable legal argument for that venue existed. If conservative principle requires procedural regularity but the procedure ultimately held, the case against Paxton narrows to a pattern argument rather than a clear legal violation, and that is genuinely harder to sustain.
Liberal's hardest question
The genuinely hard problem is that 'tenuous connection' is a contested legal judgment, not an obvious fact — Paxton's office can argue that each of the 30 venues had some colorable legal nexus, and courts that accepted jurisdiction implicitly validated that claim. If any of those venue choices survive serious judicial scrutiny, the argument shifts from 'clear abuse' to 'aggressive but arguably permissible strategy,' which is politically and legally much harder to prosecute.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides agree that Paxton's 2017 Supreme Court brief opposing forum shopping as corrosive to judicial legitimacy created a binding standard that his subsequent conduct must satisfy—the disagreement is entirely about whether his venue choices violated that standard, not whether the standard applies to him.
The real conflict
Factual: Whether thirty lawsuits filed in counties with minimal population or business presence over nine years constitutes a prosecutorial pattern (liberal claim) versus a series of individually defensible venue choices that courts accepted (conservative concession that weakens but doesn't eliminate the critique).
What nobody has answered
If Paxton's office can demonstrate that Meta genuinely conducted business in Harrison County sufficient to satisfy the 'substantial part' language of the 1990s statute—a technically possible but factually contested claim—at what point does the pattern of thirty cases become immaterial, and does that reveal the entire objection rests on the murkiness of what 'substantial' means rather than clear violation?
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