Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Bruce Tomaso spent more than 30 years as a writer and editor at The Dallas Morning News. When asked what positions he held there, he usually says it’s easier to list those he didn’t.
As enterprise editor on The News’s breaking news desk in the summer of 2016, he played a key role in covering the downtown shooting spree that left five police officers dead. For its coverage, The News was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting.
He spent most of 1997 in Denver covering the federal criminal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Four years later, he covered McVeigh’s execution.
His first major reporting assignment for The Texas Lawbook was a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the $119.6 million verdict for 10 young men who’d been molested as children by Rudy Kos, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. The stories earned Bruce and his Lawbook editor, Allen Pusey, the Dallas Bar Association’s 2018 Stephen Philbin Award for Feature Writing.
In 2019, he covered the seven-week medical fraud trial of nine physicians, healthcare executives and others associated with Forest Park Medical Center, a now-defunct Dallas surgical hospital.
He’s a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He and his wife, Dallas attorney Patricia A. Nolan, have one grown son, who is smarter than either of them.
He will drop everything, including preposterous sums of money, to see Lady Gaga, Notre Dame football, or the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
You can reach Bruce at bruce.tomaso@texaslawbook.net.
Panelists discussed key developments and enforcement trends in rapidly evolving areas of securities regulation including cryptocurrency trading and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and environmental, social and governance disclosures related to climate change.
An infringement claim against Epic Games, creator of the wildly popular Fortnite video game, is dismissed for improper venue by U.S. District Judge Alan Albright.
At the end of a weeklong trial in Marshall, a federal court jury determined that the Chamberlain Group failed to prove its garage-door patents had been infringed upon.
In Dallas, U.S. District Judge Jane J. Boyle sentences the two owners of Bitqyck to prison and orders them to pay $1.6 million each in federal income taxes.
In a civil suit in state court in Fort Worth, lawyer Rob Miller says the company, Consilio, went far beyond an agreement for discovery in a case involving one of his clients.
A state district court jury in Houston rejects a multimillion-dollar tortious-interference claim by an oil company represented by Rusty Hardin.
Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David Jones encourages the two sides to reach an agreement and move forward for ‘the person that lives in a trailer in Central Texas… that can’t afford a doubling of their electric bill.’
Clifton Karnei also testified that the emergency pricing of electricity during the storm at $9,000 per megawatt hour – hundreds of times the normal rate – did nothing to accomplish what state regulators intended.
Brazos, the state’s largest and oldest electric co-op, contends that it was plunged into bankruptcy by the $9,000-per-megawatt-hour price imposed by ERCOT during the deadly storm.
The chief federal bankruptcy judge in Houston publicly questioned the truthfulness of the former chair of the Public Utility Commission who testified Thursday under oath about her role in the Winter Storm Uri power-grid fiasco.
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