Within a month, both the 5th Circuit, and the Texas Supreme Court have issued rulings that restrict a plaintiff's right to choose the forum for his suit. In both cases, the plaintiffs sought to bring suit in a location that was technically correct, but obviously chosen for the locales perceived "friendliness" to claimants, and perceived "unfriendliness" to defendants. In public, the lawyers are saying that the choice of forum had to do with efficiency of the trial process, most people recognize that the places where the suits were filed had far more to do with the friendly jury pools than with any perceived efficiency.
If the statutes permit cases to be filed in a particular location, what business does a court have in restricting permission to file there? This is especially interesting if the defendant is claiming that the suit should have been brought just a couple of hundred miles away. Why is justice so different in one locale than another -- so much so that the parties will spend untold hours and money fighting for their preferred locale? There is no morally correct answer to the problem of "plaintiff-friendly" or "defendant-friendly" venues. There is no reason that one side or the other should have a legal standard that favors their choice. A random assignment to a particular court is common within a county, but the existence of judicial districts (on both the state and federal level) makes this artificial line-drawing a bone of contention for both sides of the docket. Maybe there will be a time to do away with this rather antiquated legal principle called "venue".
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