tExAs sup ct
see state supreme scotus
3 25 expand to texas judges more generally [someone? thom? robt r referred to recurring role?
see trump judge kacs
Enron always trying to get here?
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For the Fifth Circuit - Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Associate Justice> (Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas)
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GERRYMANDERING (back to delay? rove sup ct?):
The U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by right-wingers until Justice Kennedy’s retirement last summer, has shown repeatedly that it will not protect the franchise.Beyond crippling the Voting Rights Act, it allowed voter purges in Ohio by contorting the language of federal law. It approved all but one of the 11 Texas congressional districts that a lower court had ruled discriminatory. And it sent back to a lower court for review North Carolina’s congressional district map.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/judicial-elections-citizens-united-karl-rove/
==
Debra Ann H. Lehrmann (born November 16, 1956) is a Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, the court of last resort for civil and juvenile matters located in the capital city of Austin in the U.S. state of Texas. She is a former 360th Judicial District Court[1] judge from Fort Worth.
Background
Debra Lehrmann (née Herman) is a native of Harris County and was raised in Baytown, Texas. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated with high honors in 1979 from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1982, she received her Juris Doctor degree from the University of Texas School of Law. Prior to her appointment to the bench, she practiced family law with the Fort Worth law firm of Law, Snakard & Gambill. In 1990, she was named the "Outstanding Young Lawyer of Tarrant County." In 2003, she was cited by the Texas Bar Foundation for having written the "best bar journal article" of the year. An active member of the Family Law Section of the American Bar Association(ABA), she served as chair of the Section in 2010-2011 and as the Judicial Liaison to the Judicial Division of the ABA. She previously served on the Executive Committee of the Section Officers Conference of the ABA. Lehrmann served on the drafting committee for the ABA Standards of Practice for Lawyers Representing a Child in Abuse and Neglect Cases.[2] She also serves as a representative of the State of Texas on the Uniform Law Commission,[3] which drafts uniform laws for states to consider enacting.
On the state district court, Lehrmann specialized in family issues and abuse cases. Prior to judicial office, she was in private practice and served as the lead attorney and director of the Enforcement Division of the Tarrant County Domestic Relations Office.
She and her husband, Greg Lehrmann, have two adult sons. The family resides in Colleyville near Fort Worth in Tarrant County. They are active members of the First United Methodist Church of Colleyville.[4]
Political life
In the general election held on November 2, 2010, Lehrmann, a Republican, won the Place 3 position on the Texas Supreme Court by defeating her Democratic opponent, Jim Sharp of Houston. Lehrmann polled 2,902,003 votes (59.9 percent) to Sharp's 1,805,837 (37.3 percent). A Libertarian, William Bryan Strange, III, polled the remaining 138,579 ballots (2.9 percent).[5] Earlier she had won a primary runoff against Rick Green, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, who staged an unsuccessful comeback attempt for the Place 5 seat on the court in 2016.
Lehrmann succeeded Justice Harriet O'Neill on the all-Republican body. When O'Neill stepped down in June 2010, with more than six months left in her six-year term, then Governor Rick Perry appointed Lehrmann to fill the vacancy.[6]
Lehrmann won renomination to a second term in the Republican primary on March 1, 2016.[7] In the contested primary race, she defeated Justice Michael Christopher Massengale (born c. 1972), a sitting member of the First Court of Appeals in Houston. Lehrmann received the endorsement of the Houston Chronicle, which called her "a hard working and respected justice with impeccable credentials."[8] She was also backed by the United Republicans of Harris County. In January 2016, Justice Lehrmann polled 64 percent in a Republican straw poll in Tarrant County. She also received major party endorsements in Williamson County.[9]
With Republican primary turnout reaching a record level, Lehrmann prevailed over contender Massengale, who had accused her for not being conservative enough in her judicial work on the court, by nearly 100,000 votes, winning 1,130,137 (52.2%) to 1,034,609 (47.8%). ^[10]
Lehrmann did well statewide and won comfortable majorities in her home county of Tarrant and her opponent’s home county of Harris.[12] In the November 8 general election, Lehrmann, with 4,807,986 votes (54.8 percent), defeated the Democrat Mike Westergren, who tallied 3,378,163 (38.5 percent). The remaining 6.6 percent of the ballots case went to the nominees of the Libertarian and Green parties, Kathie Glass and Rodolfo Rivera Munoz, respectively.[11]
==
Blacklock graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.[2] He then went to Yale Law School and clerked for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Blacklock served as General Counsel to then Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and continued to serve Governor Abbott as general counsel until his appointment to the Texas Supreme Court on January 2, 2018.[3][4]
==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Texas
Supreme Court of Texas ("SCOTX") is the court of last resort for civil appeals (including juvenile delinquency which the law considers to be a civil matter and not criminal) in the U.S. state of Texas. A different court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, is the court of last resort for criminal matters.
The Court is composed of a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices. It was established in 1846 to replace the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas. The Court meets in Downtown Austin, Texas in a building located on the state Capitol grounds, behind the Texas State Capitol.
Contents
[hide]
- 1Regulation of the legal profession in Texas
- 2Unique procedural aspects
- 3Justices of the Court
- 4Supreme Court Committees
- 52014 Texas Supreme Court judicial election
- 6School funding decision
- 7Notes
- 8Further reading
- 9External links
Regulation of the legal profession in Texas
By statute, the Texas Supreme Court has administrative control over the State Bar of Texas, an agency of the judiciary.[2] The Texas Supreme Court has the sole authority to license attorneys in Texas,[3] and also appoints the members of the Board of Law Examiners[4] which, under instructions of the Supreme Court, administers the Texas bar examination.[5]
Unique procedural aspects
The Texas Supreme Court is the only state supreme court in the United States in which the manner in which it denies discretionary review can actually imply approval or disapproval of the merits of the lower court's decision and in turn may affect the geographic extent of the precedential effect of that decision. In March 1927, the Texas Legislature enacted a law directing the Texas Supreme Court to summarily refuse to hear applications for writs of error when it believed the Court of Appeals opinion correctly stated the law.[6] Thus, since June 1927, over 4,100 decisions of the Texas Courts of Appeals have become valid binding precedent of the Texas Supreme Court itself because the high court refused applications for writ of error rather than denying them and thereby signaled that it approved of their holdings as the law of the state.[6]
While Texas' unique practice saved the state supreme court from having to hear relatively minor cases just to create uniform statewide precedents on those issues, it also makes for lengthy citations to the opinions of the Courts of Appeals, since the subsequent writ history of the case must always be noted (e.g., no writ, writ refused, writ denied, etc.) in order for the reader to determine at a glance whether the cited opinion is binding precedent only in the district of the Court of Appeals in which it was decided, or binding precedent for the entire state.[6]
Justices of the Court
The Court has a Chief Justice and eight associate justices. Each member of the Court must be at least 35 years of age, a citizen of Texas, licensed to practice law in Texas, and must have practiced law (or have been a lawyer and a judge of a court of record together) for at least ten years.[7] The Clerk of the Court is appointed by the Justices and serves a four-year term.
Election of members of the Court
The Chief Justice and the Associate Justices are elected to staggered six-year terms in statewide partisanelections. When a vacancy arises the Governor of Texas may appoint Justices, subject to Senate confirmation, to serve out the remainder of an unexpired term until the next general election. As of 2017, seven of the current Justices, a majority, were originally appointed by Governor Rick Perry. The current Justices, like all the Judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, are all Republican.
The place numbers have no special meaning as all justices are elected statewide, except that the Chief Justice position is considered "Place 1".
Women on the Court
Hortense Sparks Ward, who became the first woman to pass the Texas Bar Exam in 1910, was appointed Special Chief Justice of an all-female Texas Supreme Court 15 years later. All of the court's male justices recused themselves from Johnson v. Darr, a 1924 case involving the Woodmen of the World, and, since nearly every member of the Texas Bar was a member of that fraternal organization, paying personal insurance premiums that varied with the claims decided against it, no male judges or attorneys could be found to hear the case.[8] After ten months of searching for suitable male replacements to decide the case, Governor Pat Neff decided on January 1, 1925, to appoint a special court composed of three women. This court, consisting of Ward, Hattie Leah Henenberg, and Ruth Virginia Brazzil, met for five months and ultimately ruled in favor of Woodmen of the World.[9]
On July 25, 1982, Ruby Kless Sondock became the court's first regular female justice, when she was appointed to replace the Associate Justice James G. Denton who had died of a heart attack. Sondock served the remainder of Denton's term, which ended on December 31, 1982, but did not seek election to the Supreme Court in her own right.[10] Rose Spector became the first woman elected to the court in 1992 and served until 1998 when she was defeated by Harriet O'Neill.[11]
Current justices
| Justice | Party Affiliation | Place | Date Service Began | Term Ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nathan Hecht | Republican | Chief Justice | January 1, 1989 | 2020 |
| Jimmy Blacklock | Republican | 2 | January 2, 2018 | 2018 |
| Debra Lehrmann | Republican | 3 | June 21, 2010 | 2022 |
| John P. Devine | Republican | 4 | January 1, 2013 | 2018 |
| Paul W. Green | Republican | 5 | January 1, 2005 | 2022 |
| Jeff Brown | Republican | 6 | October 3, 2013 | 2018 |
| Jeffrey S. Boyd | Republican | 7 | December 3, 2012 | 2020 |
| Phil Johnson | Republican | 8 | April 11, 2005 | 2020 |
| Eva Guzman | Republican | 9 | October 8, 2009 | 2022 |
History of membership of the Court
Main article: History of membership of the Texas Supreme Court
chief
| established by the Texas Constitution of 1876 | established by the Texas Constitution of 1876 | established by the Texas Constitution of 1876 |
|---|---|---|
| G. Moore | Democratic | 1878–1881 |
| Gould | Democratic | 1881–1882 |
| Willie | Democratic | 1882–1888 |
| Stayton | Democratic | 1888–1894 |
| Gaines | Democratic | 1894–1911 |
| Brown | Democratic | 1911–1915 |
| N. Phillips | Democratic | 1915–1921 |
| Cureton | Democratic | 1921–1940 |
| W.F. Moore | Democratic | 1940–1941 |
| Alexander | Democratic | 1941–1948 |
| Hickman | Democratic | 1948–1961 |
| Calvert | Democratic | 1961–1972 |
| Greenhill | Democratic | 1972–1982 |
| Pope | Democratic | 1982–1985 |
| Hill | Democratic | 1985–1988 |
| Phillips | Republican | 1988–2004 |
| Jefferson | Republican | 2004–2013 |
| Hecht | Republican | 2013–present |
==
...
2014 Texas Supreme Court judicial election
Texas is one of seven states that elects Supreme Court justices on partisan ballots. Four justices of the Texas Supreme Court faced re-election in 2014.[12] Three of the four sitting Supreme Court Justices, Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, Justice Jeff Brown and Justice Phil Johnson, were required to defeat challengers in a March primary before the general election in November. The candidates challenging the incumbent Supreme Court Justices, according to reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission, were recruited for the election and funded by a Houston plaintiff lawyer and Ali Davari, owner of two strip clubs: Sexy City and Erotic Zone.[13][14]
Texas for Lawsuit Reform commented on the Texas election by saying, “Plaintiff trial lawyers are making an unprecedented attempt to regain the control of the Supreme Court that they enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s, when Texas was known as 'The Lawsuit Capitol of the World.'" Also, an airing of Sixty Minutes entitled Justice for Sale gave a devastating critique of the Texas Supreme Court.[15]
Houston plaintiff lawyer Mark Lanier, funded the bulk of the campaign to remove the Texas Supreme Court and business groups. Funding was disclosed in an article titled, "Plaintiff Trial Lawyers Attempt to Distort Role of Judges and Juries."[16]
In the years preceding the Texas Judicial Election, Lanier had become a vocal critic of the Texas Supreme Court after the Supreme Court reversed his signature trial verdict against Merck & Co. on behalf of a widow whose husband died after taking Vioxx.[17] After Lanier suffered a second high-profile loss of a Vioxx case, in which the Fourteenth Court of Appeals in Houston concluded in MERCK & CO., INC. v. Ernst, a wrongful death case by a widow, that Lanier failed to show that the ingestion of Vioxx caused the death of his client's spouse.[18][19] Lanier's publicly criticized the Texas Supreme Court stating that it employs "a simpleton approach that basically white washes the trial, ignores the evidence, and is very conclusion based."[19]
Lanier responded to the appellate setbacks in a press release:
Activist judges are protecting corporate executives and stripping away the rights of widows and every other victim of corporate misconduct…This decision was handed down by a group of judges who regularly accept campaign contributions from law firms representing corporations that appear in their courts. We will appeal this decision to the United States Supreme Court if necessary.[19]
All judicial challengers recruited and funded by the Texas plaintiff lawyers lost to the incumbent Texas Supreme Court justices who won the 2014 Texas election.[20]
School funding decision
In May 2016, in a 100-page ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that public school financing, a long-term political issue in Texas, is imperfect but constitutional.Specifically, the court ruled that the funding "satisfies minimum constitutional requirements." More than half of the school districts across the state had wanted the court to force the Texas State Legislature to guarantee equal tax revenues to wealthy and poorer districts alike. The court, which has only one Democrat member among the nine justices, said that legislators must tackle school funding and not expect the court to make specific policy decisions.[21]
Notes
==
trivia question for those who fancy themselves experts on the George W. Bush era: Who is Nathan Hecht? No Googling!
Time’s up. Hecht was the Texas judge who gave a hundred and twenty rambling and occasionally bizarre interviews in support of Harriet Miers, Bush’s White House Counsel, when she briefly became a nominee for the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor, in 2005. (She was nominated on October 2nd of that year, and withdrew her candidacy on October 25th.) Miers has returned to her law practice in Dallas, and Hecht, as of last week, has a new job: he is now the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.Hecht’s rise rates as something more than a where-are-they-now story, because it illustrates, in just one way, the success of the conservative counterrevolution in the nation’s courts.
Like much about the Miers nomination, Hecht’s zealous advocacy had more than a touch of tragicomedy about it. Hecht had been an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court since 1988, and he was, at one point, romantically involved with Miers. Unfortunately, Hecht’s interviews raised more questions about their relationship than they resolved issues around Miers’s qualifications for the Court. As Hecht told the Los Angeles *Times*, “We are good, close friends. And we have been for all these years. We go to dinner. We go to the movies two or three times a year. We talk. And that’s the best way to describe it. We are not dating. We are not seeing each other romantically. Not currently.”
phhilip Wayne Johnson, known as Phil Johnson (born October 24, 1944), is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. He has held the Place 8 seat since 2005.
On March 15, 2005, Johnson was appointed to his state's Supreme Court by Governor Rick Perry to fill a vacancy created by the appointment of Michael H. Schneider to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas by U.S. President George W. Bush. Johnson was elected in 2006 to serve the remainder of Schneider's term and reelected in 2008 to a full six-year term.
Johnson's current term ends on December 31, 2014. He won renomination in the Republican primary election held on March 4, 2014, by defeating an intraparty challenger, Sharon Sue McCally (born 1960) of Houston, the Place 2 judge of the Texas Fourteenth District Court of Appeals and the wife of Lance Henry Lubel.[1]Johnson polled 731,275 votes (64 percent) to McCally's 410,870 votes (36 percent).[2]
Johnson was previously Chief Justice of the Texas Seventh District Court of Appeals, which sits in Amarillo. Johnson was elected to the Seventh Court of Appeals in 1998 and became its chief justice in 2002.
Johnson received his law degree from the Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock. He is a "distinguished alumnus" of Texas Tech Law School and a member of the Order of the Coif. He practiced law from 1975 until 1998 with the Lubbock firm of Crenshaw, Dupree & Milam, L.L.P. His specialization was civil trial and personal injury law. Previously, he was a pilot in the United States Air Force from 1965 to 1972 and a veteran of the Vietnam War. He received the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Crosstwice, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and multiple Air Medals. He and his wife, Carla, reside in Amarillo; they have five children.[3]
A lifelong Republican, Johnson carries the support of Texas Right to Life, Governor Perry, twelve former state Supreme Court justices, including former Chief Justices Tom Phillips and Wallace B. Jefferson, and both U.S. senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.[4]
References
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Sharon McCally". harriscountygop.com. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Republican primary election returns, March 4, 2014". enr.sos.state.tx.us. Archived from the original on March 5, 2014. Retrieved March 5, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Justice Phil Johnson". justicephiljohnson.com. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Conservatives across Texas are endorsing Justice Phil Johnson", mail flyer, February 2014
==
Hecht himself was the leading conservative on one of the most conservative courts in the nation. So his real purpose in the Miers nomination was to reassure conservative and evangelical groups that Miers was ideologically suitable to fill a precious seat on the Court. This was an important assignment because Miers had spent most of her life in private law practice, serving most notably as the President’s personal attorney. She had almost no public record on constitutional law. On the day Bush named her, Hecht held a conference call with evangelical leaders vouching for Miers’s anti-abortion views. If you trust me, Hecht was saying, you should trust her.
But Hecht—and Bush—failed in their sales job. Republican Presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had nominated moderates like Anthony Kennedy and David Souter to the Supreme Court, and conservatives were determined to make sure George W. Bush would not repeat the pattern. In reality, the Supreme Court appointments of Reagan and the first President Bush had been roughly consistent with the political contours of their Presidencies—largely but not entirely conservative. But the G.O.P. had changed by 2005. The moderate wing of the Party had shrunk to insignificance. Moderates were anathema, especially on the Supreme Court. A “trust me” on the Miers nomination was not good enough. The stakes were simply too high. So Republicans—not Democrats—torpedoed Miers’s chances, and Bush procured a conservative sure thing for the Court: Samuel Alito.
Hecht’s brief moment as a major public figure thus illustrated one of the larger themes of recent American political history: the centrality of the United States Supreme Court to the conservative movement. But the story of the following eight years in Hecht’s judicial career suggests something nearly as important: the transformation of state supreme courts into engines of conservative change.
For much of American history, state courts were relatively sleepy outposts for lions of the local bar. But starting in the nineteen-eighties, state supreme courts (particularly in states where judges are elected rather than appointed) became political battlegrounds. This was especially true in Texas, where a young political consultant named Karl Rove ran the campaigns that turned the Texas Supreme Court from all-Democrat to all-Republican. When Hecht first won election to the Court, in 1988, Rove ran his campaign. Led by Hecht and other Rove clients, the Texas Court became a firm ally of local business interests, especially the insurance industry. (Criminal cases in Texas are appealed to a separate court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, which is similarly conservative. In 2000, I wrote about that court and its presiding judge, Sharon Keller.)
Wallace B. Jefferson, the chief justice since 2004 and a relative moderate by Texas standards, stepped down earlier this year, which gave Governor Rick Perry a chance to fill the vacancy. Perry is leaving the governorship next year and is apparently planning another run for President, in 2016. There was no better way to cement his conservative legacy and make a further claim on the base of the Republican Party than by naming Hecht as chief justice. For conservatives, then, the story of Nathan Hecht has a doubly happy ending: with Hecht himself as chief justice in Texas and Alito adorning the nation’s highest court.
===
:{
}:
:{
trivia question for those who fancy themselves experts on the George W. Bush era: Who is Nathan Hecht? No Googling!
Time’s up. Hecht was the Texas judge who gave a hundred and twenty rambling and occasionally bizarre interviews in support of Harriet Miers, Bush’s White House Counsel, when she briefly became a nominee for the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor, in 2005. (She was nominated on October 2nd of that year, and withdrew her candidacy on October 25th.) Miers has returned to her law practice in Dallas, and Hecht, as of last week, has a new job: he is now the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Hecht’s rise rates as something more than a where-are-they-now story, because it illustrates, in just one way, the success of the conservative counterrevolution in the nation’s courts.
Like much about the Miers nomination, Hecht’s zealous advocacy had more than a touch of tragicomedy about it. Hecht had been an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court since 1988, and he was, at one point, romantically involved with Miers. Unfortunately, Hecht’s interviews raised more questions about their relationship than they resolved issues around Miers’s qualifications for the Court. As Hecht told the Los Angeles *Times*, “We are good, close friends. And we have been for all these years. We go to dinner. We go to the movies two or three times a year. We talk. And that’s the best way to describe it. We are not dating. We are not seeing each other romantically. Not currently.”
:{
}:
==
}: