Today, Governor Perry announced the appointment of district judge Debra Lehrmann to be a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, effective June 21, 2010.

Judge Lehrmann will be assuming Place 3, the seat of Justice O”Neill, who a few weeks ago formally notified the Governor that she would be stepping down on June 20, 2010.

Place 3 is up for election this fall, and Justice Lehrmann is already the Republican nominee for that seat. On the fall ballot, she is opposed by Justice Jim Sharp (D) and William Strange (L).

More links about the election, including a short Q&A with soon-to-be Justice Lehrmann, are collected on our Elections 2010 page.

When does the US Supreme Court ask for information from the federal government and bypass OSG? When does the Court do its own research into factual data underlying a party’s constitutional theory?

According to the Blog of Legal Times, both those things happened in Graham v. Florida, the case decided earlier this month holding that the Eighth Amendment prohibits a life-without-parole sentence for a juvenile whose crime did not involve homicide.

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Justice O’Neill will be stepping down from the Texas Supreme Court on June 20, 2010. This gives the Governor the opportunity to appoint an interim replacement to serve through the fall election. (The betting is that the Governor will appoint the Republican nominee for the seat, Debra Lehrmann.)

What follows is the email just sent by the Court’s public information officer, Osler McCarthy:

Friday, May 7, 2010
JUSTICE O’NEILL TO LEAVE COURT JUNE 20

Justice Harriet O’Neill, who announced last year she would not seek re-election, today sent notice to Texas Governor Rick Perry of her resignation as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas effective June 20. O’Neill became the first woman elected to the Court to preside as Chief Justice, when she was the senior justice on the bench during oral argument. When she leaves, she will be the longest-serving woman justice in the Court’s history.

“I am deeply grateful for the unique opportunity to have served the people of this great state during my nearly 18-year tenure on the district court, the court of appeals and the Supreme Court of Texas,” O’Neill said. “It has been an honor to serve with men and women of the highest integrity. I hope that my service has justified the confidence that the voters have placed in me.”

“To say Justice O’Neill will be missed on this Court would be an understatement,” Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson said. “In addition to her tremendous contribution to Texas law, her legacy will be a vastly improved judicial process for abused and neglected children and a determined effort by the Legislature and attorneys across the state to improve the delivery of legal services to people who cannot afford lawyers.”

Justice O’Neill joined the Court in January 1999, having been elected the previous November. She had been a justice on Houston’s 14th District Court of Appeals and, before that, a Harris County district judge.

Explaining her decision to leave the court before her term expires in December, O’Neill said: “After careful consideration, I timed my departure to cause the least disruption to the Court’s docket.”

O’Neill spearheaded the Supreme Court’s creation of the Permanent Judicial Commission for Children, Youth and Families, a coordinated effort to improve court practice and enhance resources for children under court supervision. She was also a founding member of the Texas Access to Justice Commission, which seeks to improve the administration of justice by ensuring that people with basic civil legal needs have access to the courts, regardless of income.

Justice O’Neill will announce her future plans after June 20.

There is a new appellate law blog to add to your feed readers. Kendall Gray has been working toward the launch of The Appellate Record for some time. Today, I got a tweet announcing that it was finally live.

So check it out. His first few posts cover a little of everything.

File this under “be careful what you ask for.”

A group of class-action plaintiffs has filed a federal lawsuit demanding that the Texas Supreme Court issue a more prompt ruling on the pending state court appeal challenging their class certification.

The plaintiffs’ contention is that their federal constitutional rights are being violated by not being able to pursue their state class-action during the pendency of the appeal. (( Paragraph 10 of the complaint claims that “[f]or nearly a year, Case No. 05-0748 has been the oldest appeal awaiting a decision at the Texas Supreme Court….” That’s not how I would describe my own docket data; I do not draw a distinction between appeals and original proceedings set for oral argument. Although my docket-tracking website is referenced in paragraph 38, I was not consulted about this complaint and cannot speak to any of its other factual allegations. )) The appeal is Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. v. Marketing on Hold, No. 05-0748 (docket and briefs). A PDF of the federal complaint is here [2.3MB]. It names each of the nine (current) Justices in their official capacities.

If this unusual lawsuit can have a most unusual feature, it might be this: among the plaintiffs is Harris County, Texas (Texas’s most populous county) — so a local arm of Texas government is attempting to assert §1983 civil-rights case against Texas state officials. (I’ll leave that problem set for your next Fed Courts exam.)

The 45-page lawsuit just asks for unspecified “declaratory relief,” but I’m not sure what that would accomplish. On reflection, I’m not sure whether this complaint is a political stunt or an extraordinary form of appellate seppuku. It’s rarely effectively advocacy to spit at the Court that is deciding your case.

While we’re in the process of moving to electronic briefs, perhaps the time has come to rethink how we record trial court proceedings.

A recent post on CourTex raises that question and links to a report from a national court administration group that suggests digital recording for trials.

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The Court was scheduled to hear argument next week in In re Texas Attorney, No. 09-0277, a case about what powers the Board of Disciplinary Appeals has to oversee initial attorney disciplinary proceedings before they are complete — the power asserted here, as I understand it, was akin to mandamus review of a trial court.

Even reading about that issue deserves some ethics CLE credit. (No, I don’t recommend that you try to claim it.)

But the question will remain an academic one, at least for now. In an order released today, the Texas Supreme Court granted an unopposed motion to vacate the opinion below and dismiss the appeal.

The Texas Tribune has an article today about the challenge in the Republican primary to incumbent Justice Felipe Reyna of the Waco Court of Appeals. Justice Reyna was appointed by Governor Perry in 2003 and reelected in 2004.

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