Kevin Gafford Ritz
How Judge Ritz decides
Patterns drawn from this judge's own signed orders. Every observation links to the order it came from.
What persuades
Reads a statute's operative words literally and holds a defendant to what it actually says, not a more sympathetic gloss: TCPA liability under the sender/seller distinction turns on who sent the fax and had a sufficiently direct profit motive, not on whether the sender was also selling the advertised product.
“Advertisements attempt to 'promote[] the sale' of goods or services. ... It is a small logical step to conclude that a sender may be liable for advertising a product it does not sell.”
Holds an agency to procedures it has actually adopted, not procedures it wishes it had: the BIA cannot reject a filing for a mismatch the regulations and practice manual never required, and cannot fault a petitioner for missing a deadline he in fact met.
“No such requirement appears in the BIA's rules or procedures. ... Where the BIA creates a requirement and failure to adhere to that requirement could result in rejection or dismissal of a filing, the BIA makes this clear.”
Resists expanding narrow legal categories (here, structural error) by analogy to sympathetic facts; insists on measuring an error's actual effect through harmless-error analysis rather than presuming automatic reversal merely because a case is factually unusual.
“Again, very few errors meet Weaver's too-hard-to-measure threshold for structural error. ... Every criminal trial is, of course, at least to some degree unique.”
Signed rulings
A grounded sample of orders signed by this judge, with the verbatim dispositive language.
“For these reasons, we affirm the district court's judgment.”
“We dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.”
“The district court granted summary judgment for UCCI. We reverse.”
“Because the BIA abused its discretion, we grant the petition for review.”
“We dismiss Zhou's petition for review.”
“For those reasons, we affirm Freed's entitlement to fees from Gratiot County and Michigan and vacate and remand for recalculation of the fee award amount.”
“For these reasons, we hold that § 922(g)(1) is constitutional as applied to Taylor and affirm the district court's judgment.”
“For the above reasons, we reverse the district court's grant of a new trial and remand for further proceedings.”
“For these reasons, we affirm the district court's judgment.”
“Although procedural errors and anomalies occurred here, none warrant vacatur of Harrell's forfeiture sentence. For the foregoing reasons, we affirm.”
“We reverse as to Ashly's excessive-force claim and affirm as to the remaining claims.”
Put Judge Ritz's record to work
Ezel drafts and answers grounded in this exact profile: how Judge Ritz actually rules, not a generic AI guess.
Opens in Ezel Pro. Every answer is grounded in Judge Ritz's own signed orders and cites them.