"From Coffee and Weddington's point of view, the panel looked as if it had been hand-picked for them, and indeed, many people were willing to believe that Fifth Circuit Chief Judge John Brown had weighted the panel in favor of the abortion-reform forces. It is highly unlikely that he did any such thing. First of all, the Fifth Circuit at the time was judicially active and liberal; second, there were guidelines about the choice of judges for a three-judge court. Since Coffee had filed two separate cases, which were assigned to two different judges, the judges in whose courts the cases fell were automatically appointed to the panel when the case were consolidated; that accounted for the presence of Taylor and Hughes on the panel and left Brown with only one justice to appoint with a free hand. That had to be a circuit judge, and Goldberg was an obvious choice since he lived in Dallas. Nevertheless, the makeup of the panel provided the two young lawyers with an enormous psychological boost."