Miserable Trump-appointed judge abruptly resigns — and leaves huge workload behind: report

U.S. District Judge Alan Albright abruptly announced his resignation this month, leaving his colleagues with a huge stack of unresolved casework — and it may be because he was simply miserable in his role as a judge, Ryan Autullo of Bloomberg Law reported on Monday.

Albright, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2018, will be leaving in August.

"US Judge Alan Albright gave signs he wasn't enjoying the job before his surprise resignation last week," Autullo wrote in a post to X promoting the story. "From a big case backlog to holding hearings virtually to farming out his docket to a Magistrate, Albright was over it."

"The Western District of Texas had 129 civil cases pending for three years or longer, as of last September, and 70% belonged to Albright. He also accounted for 63% of the 706 civil motions that were ripe for a decision for six months or longer but hadn’t been resolved," said the report. "Albright had 446 undecided motions as of September 2025, nearly twice that of any other district judge in the three states that make up the Fifth Circuit. Albright’s judicial colleagues in Austin, Robert Pitman and David Ezra, had none."

“He has a huge docket that now the other judges are going to have, because it’s not going to go down appreciably by the end of August, no matter how hard he works,” former Texas-based U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel told Bloomberg Law.

Albright mostly worked on issues of patent litigation. However, on some other occasions, he dipped into more intense political controversy.

Ironically, one of his most notable decisions was a ruling against Trump's party, rejecting the Texas GOP's book-banning legislation in a 2023 decision as an “unconstitutional law” that “could lead to banning classic works of literature.”