Thomas v. Whitworth

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that “[sjection 636 does not permit magistrate judges, under the guise of the ‘additional duties’ clause, to conduct the jury selection portion of a civil trial unless the parties have given their consent”
• noting that the issue of whether a magistrate judge may conduct jury selection in a civil case without the parties’ consent is a “question[] of law that must be examined de novo.”
• “[T]he con- cept of harmless error cannot be used to sustain the underlying judgment, since that judgment was rendered by a jury whose selec- tion was supervised by a magistrate judge who lacked the authority to undertake the task designated to him by the district court.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).