With about a week to go before the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals goes live, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling Friday morning, unanimously rejecting a constitutional challenge to the creation of the court.
The ruling comes in a case filed by Dallas County in May. The county had asked the state’s high court to declare the newly-created court unconstitutional in a bid to prevent its lawsuit against the Texas Health and Human Services Commission — currently pending with the Austin Court of Appeals — from being transferred Sept. 1 when the new court goes live.
Justice Evan Young, who supported the creation of business courts prior to being appointed to the court by Gov. Abbott, authored the court’s 39-page opinion.
“The question for us is purely legal: which court must decide the underlying appeal? Either way, it will be a court that exercises statewide jurisdiction — the court to which the legislature has routed cases like this one before S.B. 1045 or the court that the legislature, by enacting S.B. 1045, has determined should now hear such cases,” Justice Young wrote. “We hold that S.B. 1045 is constitutional with respect to the challenges that Dallas County raises. We therefore deny relief, which means that the appeal must be transferred as scheduled.”
Opponents of the creation of the court had argued it was an attempt by Republican lawmakers to undermine the authority of the Democratically-controlled appellate court in Austin. Many following this case believed it was a foregone conclusion that the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court would reject the constitutional challenge.
In June, the Legislature passed and the governor signed into law S.B. 1045, which created the Fifteenth Court of Appeals and granted it exclusive, statewide jurisdiction over certain cases involving the state or state officials.
In the underlying case, Dallas County accuses the HHS of failing to comply with obligations to transfer inmates who have been determined not competent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity from the county jail to state hospitals.
Dallas County argued that S.B. 1045 specifically violates Article V, Section 6 of the state constitution that requires courts of appeals be “divided” into “districts.” The county argued the plain meaning of both “divide” and “district” remains the same today as when the state’s constitution was adopted.
“Even the Legislature thought it could not ‘divide’ the state into a statewide Court of Appeals ‘district,”’ Dallas County argued. “In Section 1.01 of S.B. 1045, the Legislature remarkably struck the word “divided” from the relevant statute, Tex. Gov’t. Code § 22.201(a), and replaced it with ‘organized.’”
In addressing some of the county’s constitutional arguments, Justice Young distinguished between docket equalization measures undertaken by the Texas Supreme Court and the structure of the Fifteenth Court of Appeals, writing that the new court is a “lesser intrusion into the ordinary judicial system than transferring an appeal to a court with no ties whatsoever to the transferor region.”
“Such a transfer effectively strips the court of the region from which the case arose of jurisdiction over the appeal and gives that jurisdiction to another court,” he explained. “For example, a case from Bexar County would ordinarily go to the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio, but if docket congestion so requires, we could transfer it to the Seventh Court of Appeals in Amarillo — to be decided by judges who are in no way accountable to the voters in San Antonio.”
“Unlike in that hypothetical case, however, the Fifteenth Court’s justices will be electorally accountable to the citizens of every court of appeals district from which a case would otherwise come.”
But Justice Young cautioned that the court’s ruling shouldn’t be read to say there is “no limit on the legislature’s ability to divest courts of their jurisdiction, even as we confirm that the legislature’s authority is broad.”
“After all, the Constitution does not provide for the total divestiture of the judicial power, but instead states that ‘[t]he judicial power of this State shall be vested in one Supreme Court,’ in various other named courts, ‘and in such other courts as may be provided by law.’”
The justices also rejected Dallas County’s argument that the Fifteenth Court is “constitutionally tainted” because voters won’t see those justices appointed by the governor on the ballot until the November 2026 general election instead of the November 2024 election.
“The appointment of the justices is prescribed by S.B. 1045, but it is § 202.002 of the Election Code that provides the mechanism for how the appointments unfold and when the new judicial positions must first appear on the ballot,” the opinion reads. “We agree with the County, of course, that if § 202.002 contravenes the Constitution, we must disregard it. But we see no good argument to support that result.”
Dallas County is represented by Chad W. Dunn and K. Scott Brazil of Brazil & Dunn and E. Leon Carter and Ana Jordan of Carter Arnett.
HHSC is represented by Allison M. Collins and William Wassdorf of the Texas attorney general’s office.
The case number is 24-0426.