The challenge to Texas’s parental-termination system in the US Supreme Court, which I first wrote about in this post, has come to a quiet end.

The case became notable when the US Supreme Court formally called for the views of the Texas state solicitor general, believed to be the first such request. The Texas SG did file that invitation brief, recommending that the Court deny review. With today’s order list (PDF), the Court did.

Most commentary about today’s Citizens United decision will focus on congressional and presidential elections.

But the decision may hit closer to home. Professor Rick Hasen brings some attention to the effect that Citizens United may have on judicial elections, especially in light of Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal:

The ways out of this box are not easy to see. Corporate spending limits are effectively off the table. Disclosure alone is unlikely to get enough attention, particularly for a public that pays scant attention to judicial races. Recusal motions against particular judges are going to be hard to win.

The most direct way “out of this box” might be for individual judges to be more concrete (and public) about their recusal policies. That’s not an institutional answer, but it is one completely within the control of the judicial branch. A recusal policy that is easy for voters to understand would also be easy for voters to police.

Update: There is a related post over at First One @ One First, which has some extended quotations from the Citizens United dissent. That blog promises coverage of a panel discussion on this question next Tuesday at Georgetown Law including (among other luminaries) former Chief Justice Tom Phillips.

Court watchers in Texas have a unique resource in CourTex, a blog maintained by Carl Reynolds, the director of Texas’s Office of Court Administration.

In a recent post, Carl relayed some new data analyzed in his office about the frequency of jury trials in Texas. For the past three years, roughly half of one percent of civil matters ended in a jury trial. (( These numbers were calculated to exclude family-law cases. ))

This will be the second election cycle for SCOTXblog.

To help readers follow and make sense of the Texas Supreme Court campaigns, I’ve added a page about the 2010 Texas Supreme Court Elections through a link on the menu bar.

I will be adding new resources and links as I get them. As always, I appreciate anything helpful you want to bring to my attention.

SCOTXblog Candidate Q&A

I’m also considering a SCOTXblog Candidate Q&A, giving each Texas Supreme Court candidate the chance to answer a few questions with the results printed here.

My plan is to ask questions that might say something about the candidates’ approach to deciding cases — the types of questions we lawyers ask new judges as soon as they’ve been elected. Why not ask them now?

If you have thoughts about this idea, or a favorite question you’d like to see answered, please leave a comment or send me a private email.

David White over at the Law and Insurance blog wrote yesterday about a recent Fifth Circuit decision that narrowly construed the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Mid-Continent Insurance Co. v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., 236 S.W.3d 765 (Tex. 2007) docket and briefs.

David’s post, titled “Federal Court Refuses to Extend Mid-Continent Ruling to Defense Costs”, is worth reading.

Read a little more about this

Disputing has a this helpful recap of the Texas Supreme Court’s arbitration cases from the year 2009. (( Yes, there’s a little time left in the year. But the season for year-end retrospectives traditionally begins around the same time as the Black Friday sales. ))

How many of those cases could there be, from one court about one issue? The answer, so far, is an even dozen.

The case tapped as “[p]erhaps the most significant” of these arbitration cases was In re Morgan Stanley, Inc., No. 07-0665 (more info. In that, “The court declined to follow Fifth Circuit precedent and held that the court, not the arbitrator should decide the issue of capacity to contract.” A summary of the case by Victoria VanBuren of Disputing is here; commentary by Professor Alan Scott Rau is here.

On Friday, the Court requested briefing on the merits in more than twenty pending cases. Through that link, you can see the full list or subscribe to an RSS feed for updates about similar orders. (( The SCOTXblog sidebar also shows the most twenty recent requests, but a large release of orders from the Court can overfill its capacity. ))

The Court is not expected to issue any (non-emergency) orders this holiday week.

I’ve written before about how to use Google’s normal search index to find unpublished opinions in Texas.

Google has now formally added legal opinions to another of its products — Google Scholar — promising new ways to research legal case law (and some legal journals, too).

This is something that I have been expecting to see from Google for a few years. Google has clearly put the extra time to good use. Its first attempt is quite polished and looks like it might be usable for serious legal work.

And, in typical Google fashion, the price is right. (( Interestingly, they chose to integrate legal cases into Google Scholar, which lets academic publishers keep the full text of their articles behind a paywall. I will be curious to see if some legal treatises and reference books show up with those same paywalls attached. ))

The rest of this post is a quick walk-through of the service with some first impressions.

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