In person, Jonathan Mitchell is polite and even soft-spoken. But he’s also relentless — even when he knows he’s about to exasperate a federal judge.
“Are you a Texan?” U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Lane asked from the bench, on a recent morning in late April, after Mitchell’s clients had failed to show up for a scheduled deposition. “What part of courteous lawyering is this?”
Mitchell was inside a federal courtroom in Austin for a discovery hearing in a book-banning case from tiny Llano, Texas. He is defending local officials who’ve been sued over the removal of public library books after conservative activists deemed them offensive. Local library patrons are challenging the removal on First Amendment grounds.
