This Thursday and Friday, the State Bar is holding its Advanced Civil Appellate Practice Course (which has generated the mouthful of a Twitter hashtag #advcivapp10).

Three of the programs are specific to the Texas Supreme Court:

• Thursday at 9:40, Pam Baron will be presenting a talk near to my heart, “Supreme Court Trends and Statistics.” (( When speaking about Texas Supreme Court cases, it’s always nicer to have the Thursday speaking slot — no one expects you to have already digested the Friday morning orders. ))

• On Friday afternoon, former Justice Brister will be presenting the formal Texas Supreme Court update at 1:00.

• That will be followed by a panel discussion with Chief Justice Jefferson, Justice Hecht, Justice Johnson, and Justice Guzman at 1:30 (with former Justice Hankinson moderating).

I enjoyed the conference last year, and I’m sorry to miss it this year. (I’m leaving in the morning to visit family out of state. Luckily or not, they have internet access, so don’t be too surprised to get a blog post on Friday.)

Texas Lawyer explains the basic reason in “Bar Turns Over 63,000 Member Email Addresses to Law Student”. As the headline suggests, someone filed an open-records request for this information and (soon after filing a lawsuit) received an electronic file with the addresses. Quite promptly, the person who made the request sent out an email lobbying for even stricter changes to the disciplinary rules. (( The email asks recipients to vote against the proposed new disciplinary rules about sex with clients because the rules are not strict enough, which so far as I can tell, would leave in place the relatively more lax rules we have today. The ways of politics are mysterious to me. ))

I received this email, too. I didn’t know quite what to make of it — the return address was mysterious, and you could tell by the email headers that it had been sent through a bulk-email system (Campaigner).

The Texas Lawyer article hints, but does not quite say, that the bar’s disclosure excluded lawyers who had made an affirmative election under Government Code §552.1176 to keep their email addresses private. (( Sec. 552.1176. CONFIDENTIALITY OF CERTAIN INFORMATION MAINTAINED BY STATE BAR.
(a) Information that relates to the home address, home telephone number, electronic mail address, social security number, or date of birth of a person licensed to practice law in this state that is maintained under Chapter 81 is confidential and may not be disclosed to the public under this chapter if the person to whom the information relates:
(1) chooses to restrict public access to the information; and
(2) notifies the State Bar of Texas of the person’s choice, in writing or electronically, on a form provided by the state bar.
(b) A choice made under Subsection (a) remains valid until rescinded in writing or electronically by the person.
(c) All documents filed with a county clerk and all documents filed with a district clerk are exempt from this section. ))

I don’t much mind a stray email or two; if you want to get all sorts of interesting emails, you should start a law blog. But if for some reason you don’t want your email address included in the next data dump that the state bar provides to a marketing company (and I’d expect that within the next few weeks), this might be a good time to check your email privacy settings on the State Bar website.

Court-watchers might also note that the State Bar won a previous lawsuit about releasing attorney records that made its way to the Austin Court of Appeals. Looking at the law prior to the enactment of §552.1176, the Austin Court concluded that the bar’s attorney records were judicial records not subject to the open-records act. The Texas Supreme Court denied review in that case (DDB).

I wanted to pass along an unusual set of job opportunities for readers in the Houston area who are interested in making a transition to appellate law — including new graduates who have just taken the bar exam.

The First Court of Appeals has three job postings up:

• A law clerk position, open to new graduates and others. (( Update: This job listing says that a Texas license is required for this law clerk position, but I’ve been told that it is open to new graduates. I would not worry about that language. I suspect the court just recycled that part of the listing they normally use for staff attorneys. The application packet for 2011-2012 law clerks makes clear that “A license to practice is not a requirement, although applicants are encouraged to take the Texas Bar.” (PDF). There’s no reason this law clerk position should be any different. )) (PDF) The listing says “Ideally, the applicant will be available to begin training with other Law Clerks on August 31, 2010.” So if you’re a new graduate and the kind of person who reads this blog, you might want to send them a resume. Now.

• A staff attorney position for an attorney with some experience (PDF). The term “staff attorney” is the Texas terminology for a more permanent, more senior law clerk. (( Much as Texas eventually changed the term “briefing attorney” to “law clerk,” they probably should change staff attorney to something more befitting the position. ))

• A central staff attorney position, which would involve tasks for the Court as a whole more than any particular Justice (PDF).

I’ve written before about the benefits of a clerkship to start your legal career. And I have met quite a few attorneys that used used a well-timed stint as a staff attorney to shift the focus of their career toward appellate law.

I hope that three of my readers are about to do the same.

After I heard about these openings, I looked through the other court of appeals websites for similar postings. All I saw was a staff attorney position open in the Waco Court (PDF).

If you think sparring with a judge during oral argument is tough, try sparring with a judge in a gym, in a sport featuring spin kicks, and a referee that yells “fight!”

Justice David Medina’s biography notes that “in college he competed on the university’s karate . . . team.”.

He really wasn’t kidding.

Turns out, he recently participated in a match — with a law clerk. Tickets to the match were a featured item at the Court’s annual holiday charity auction.

Thanks to the power of YouTube, you can watch from the comfort and relative safety of your office.

• Preliminaries to the match and Round  1 (2:31)

• Round 2 (1:33)

• Round 3 and announcement of winner (2:33)

If you can’t decide whether to click on one of those links, you may want to read how the matches are scored:

Scoring: 1 point for punches or kicks to the body and punches to the head or face; 2 points for kicks to the head; jumps or spins add a point, so 3 points for spin kicks to the head (2 for spin kicks to the body).

Earlier this year, the Marketing on Hold case (DocketDB) got some unusual attention when the Respondent (a putative class representative) filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that the time the Texas Supreme Court was taking to issue its decision violated constitutional rights.

Barely a week later, the Texas Supreme Court decided the case. Divided 5-3, the Court held that the plaintiff (who was an assignee of someone else’s claims) was not an adequate class representative.

The plaintiff filed a motion for rehearing and a demand that the Texas Supreme Justice who authored the majority opinion be recused. Both motions were denied in May.

Today, the federal district court resolved the federal case, dismissing it as moot now that the state court process is over.

Last summer, the Texas Supreme Court issued its first decision about the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In Pastor Rick Barr and Philemon Homes, Inc. v. City of Sinton, No. 06-0074, the Texas Supreme Court adopted a framework for testing the legality of government burdens on the freedom of exercise of religion by a prison halfway house. (A few articles about that case are collected on DocketDB.)

This month, the Fifth Circuit has applied that same Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act to a case involving a school policy that demanded a kindergartener from a Native American background cut his hair or cover its length.

In A.A. v. Needville Independent School District (5th Cir. July 9, 2010), the court held that the school policy violated the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The panel split. Judge Higginbotham looked to Barr in construing the Texas statute broadly. Thus, even the school district’s (later) offers to let A.A. cover his long hair instead of cutting it were nonetheless substantial burdens.

Judge Jolly, in dissent, would have held that some of the school district’s “off the collar” options for the hair would not have imposed a “substantial burden” on religious exercise to trigger the act. He criticized the majority for “fram[ing] the plaintiffs’ purported religious belief not merely to be uncut long hair, but to be the visibility of hair length.”

Hat tip: Volokh, with background on state RFRA laws here.

The Court’s website doesn’t have a more formal announcement that Justice Lehrmann has been sworn in, but the large photograph on the Court’s home page speaks pretty clearly:

If you have an oral argument coming up this fall, you may want to soak in the new arrangement of Justices. With the exception of Justice Hecht and the Chief Justice, everyone else has shuffled places.

Other coverage of Justice Lerhmann”s swearing-in ceremony this afternoon:

• Austin American-Statesman

The Texas Tribune has published an interview with soon-to-be-Justice Debra Lehrmann. Judge Lehrmann will join the Court on June 21, 2010 to serve the remainder of Justice O’Neill’s current term, standing for reelection this November.

The Tribune’s interview format is a nice hybrid between a traditional article and a transcript. It condenses and distills some key points, but also embeds short audio clips that give more context for her answers.