The Statesman has an article about Senator Watson’s bill to require the Texas Supreme Court to report votes on every decision to grant or deny a petition. According to the article, the bill has been slow to move since being voted out of committee. “Only one pending bill has waited longer, and the session ends in less than one month.”

This one is confusing enough to make you glad you’re not a judge.

If you saw the Statesman editorial a few weeks ago about Entergy you may have been struck by the closing call:

And lawmakers should spell it out in terms that even a majority of the Texas Supreme Court can’t reinterpret to please certain business interests.

Turns out, the Legislature is debating a bill that would order the Texas Supreme Court to ignore some (but not all) changes to its recodified (but not other) statutes, as Paul Burka recently discussed on his blog. Burka seems to quietly applaud this bill. I find it disturbing.

Read more of my thoughts about this

You’ve probably seen this mentioned on the Court’s own press release or maybe in Texas Lawyer. No one who has followed the Court’s recent burst of insurance decisions can really doubt the Texas Supreme Court’s importance to insurance law.

In about a year, according to the press release, the Texas Supreme Court handed down sixteen insurance-related decisions. And, in an analysis that may surprise people on both sides of the bar, Lexis breaks down the results as perfectly split between insurers and the insureds.

I think Lexis stretched a bit in running up the overall total — with questionable examples being the First American case (about taxes imposed by the government on insurers, not an insured-insurer dispute — opinion docket) and Perry Homes v. Cull (about the enforcement of an arbitration clause between a homebuilder and homebuyer — opinion docket). That said, Lexis counted First American as a win for “insureds” and Perry Homes as a win for “insurers,” so those two didn’t affect the balance.

But, as Tex Parte noted, the Entergy case is counted as a win for “insureds,” which suggests some weakness in Lexis’s analytical approach to this scorecard. (( Lexis originally said that granting rehearing was “probably a good sign for claimants, who in the previous opinion were precluded from recovering more than workers compensation benefits in most circumstances.” But then when rehearing left the judgment unchanged, Lexis counted the result as a win for “insureds.” It’s true that Entergy Gulf States was the “insured” under its workers compensation insurance policy, but the loser in the case was the injured worker. At least in cases involving third-party claimants, Lexis’s scorecard is a bit simplistic. )) If anyone has walked through these cases and done a more sophisticated count, please let me know.

Today’s “Practice Before the Texas Supreme Court” CLE

It looks like a good one. I will, unfortunately, not be there because of a conflicting engagement. I’d love to hear about it later (or contemporaneously, if anyone there will be doing the trendy Twitter thing).

At least I’m not alone with having conflicts. At least two Justices will be attending the Travis County Bench-Bar event, and Justice Hecht is of course hosting a two-day Rules Advisory Committee extravaganza.

The Entergy bill leaves the House committee

The Statesman weighs in today, saying that the Legislature should “correct” the Supreme Court on its recent Entergy decision (DB).

The editorial notes that the House version of the bill, introduced by Rep. Giddings, was voted out of committee 9-0. It now moves to the full House.

A bill that would clarify the private status of state employee birthdates

Another bill would answer the question raised by Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts v. Attorney General and the Dallas Morning News, No. 08-0172, a pending case that should be heard for argument this fall, by making the exact dates of birth of state employees confidential information that is exempt from disclosure under Texas Public Information Act.

This bill was also proposed by Rep. Giddings.

Coverage: Dallas Morning News (AP) and Weatherford Democrat (AP).

Fort Worth Court gets approval for new local rule about submitting electronic copies of briefing

The Fort Worth Court’s new local rule, like so many others, requests the brief as a word-searchable PDF — not a scanned copy of a printout.

It always surprises me how many law firms file scanned copies instead, resulting in bloated files that are difficult for the Justices (and of course court-watchers) to work with.

The Texas Supreme Court Rules Advisory Committee is meeting Friday and Saturday to discuss proposed rules including adding e-filing to the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure. The proposed rules would include an electronic version of the appellate record.

Other tidbits:

• Proposed TRAP 11 would permit amicus briefs to actually “be filed” rather than merely be received by the clerk, bringing the terminology back in line with actual practice.

• When paper copies are filed in the Texas Supreme Court or courts of appeals, only an original and one copy would be required. The draft notes that this proposed rule assumes the courts will have the ability to quickly scan any paper materials to circulate internally.

  If that comes to pass, I hope the courts use these scanned copies to make briefs more readily available online, rather than the current system that depends on the cooperation of the parties to later submit PDF copies for that purpose.

Also on the agenda for discussion are some proposed changes to the rules governing post-trial practice, including complete rewrites of the rules governing motions for new trial and revisions to the rules governing the requests for findings of fact and conclusions of law.

Justice O’Neill Honored

Yesterday, the Texas Supreme Court announced that Justice O’Neill has received a national award for her work against child abuse and neglect.

A Glimpse Into Local Government Litigation

I like to report here when litigants claim, sometimes before trial begins, “we’re taking this issue all the way to the Texas Supreme Court.” Some of those cases make it; many do not.

But this story is a little different. Here, the litigant is a local government (the Aransas County Navigation District) and the opposing party is what the article describes as “a prominent and respected local family.”

The Rockport Point Pilot News of Aransas County describes the dispute:

Under the terms of this document, the Navigation District agreed to use public finds to construct Fulton Harbor, to the benefit of the family’s business. In exchange, the Johnson family would deed certain waterfront property to the Navigation District in exchange for a 99-year no-cost lease. The harbor and breakwater were built, but the land was not deeded over. The Johnson’s position is that the document in question does not constitute a valid contract and cannot be enforced. The district’s position is that it is a valid contract and should be enforced. The lower courts have rendered opposite opinions on this question.

Two members of the board moved to kill the lawsuit, letting the family win. After some public agonizing (for a taste, one board member’s statement was reprinted in the paper), the board decided 3-2 to let the lawsuit proceed and a petition for review be filed.

Yesterday, the Texas Supreme Court promoted 15 more cases from the petition stage to the briefing on the merits stage. The parties will complete full briefing over the next few months, and then the Court will decide whether to set these cases for the fall argument calendar.

A list of these briefing requests will appear in the blog’s sidebar for the next month, or you can subscribe to my separate RSS feed tracking that information.

Last week, the Texas Senate Jurisprudence Committee heard testimony on Senate Bill 780, the bill to require the Texas Supreme Court to report how each Justice voted on each petition disposition.

The hearing is available on video (requires Realplayer). At the suggestion of a reader, I watched the hearing this morning. SB780 was first on the agenda, and that portion of the hearing lasts about 25 minutes.

My notes and thoughts after the jump