With the official Texas court websites down for the time being after a ransomware attack, you may be landing on this blog looking for information about an ongoing appeal or about one of the Texas Supreme Court’s recent opinions.

Recent opinions

The good news is that this website hosts its own copy of the Texas Supreme Court’s PDF opinion releases, going back to the 2004 term. I’ll be keeping them current during this outage.

If you are looking for recent opinions from this Term, those are collected together on this page. If you’d like to see recent opinions organized a different way, you can do that through this chart.

If you want to find a specific older opinion from the Texas Supreme Court, I recommend you use the search box at the top right of this page to locate that case in my system. This particular search box only works by case name or docket number.

At least on a temporary basis, the Texas courts are publishing a list of (nearly all?) new appellate opinions on this page.

Recent orders lists

My version of the Texas Supreme Court’s Friday orders is available at this link. Beginning with the May 8, 2020 orders, I’ll be entering the key items by hand, so my list might take a short while to be updated each Friday.

I make previous sets of orders available through this Calendar of Orders page, which lets you navigate back to October 2003.

The Court is (temporarily at least) also publishing PDF versions of its released orders on this page.

Docket pages

My mirrored copy of the Court’s docket was current through May 7. I’m working on a way to more reliably update my database with key case events since then. But for now, I would advise caution. The entries that are there, are there. But you should not assume that the lack of a docket entry on my website means there has been no activity on the Court’s internal system.

Newly filed cases – still an open question

One open question is how to track newly filed cases — such as short-fuse mandamus petitions that might have been filed after the official websites shut down on May 8. I’m working on a way to add those to my system, but (for now) they might only show up as docket pages on my site after the Court issues its first public order or opinion mentioning the case.

If this turns out to be a fairly short outage, that will work itself out. If the outage is longer — as the new cases start to become a bigger share of the docket — I will need to find a better way to track newly filed cases.