Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Industry says legal battle could harm state’s renewable energy credit market; TXU says those claims are overblown. Nina Cortell of Haynes and Boone argues for FPL Energy, while James Ho of Gibson Dunn represents Luminant Energy.
Long known for its business-friendly litigation climate, Texas has quietly become the national leader in using the courthouse to punish one set of corporations, pharmaceutical companies that cheat government health programs. Teaming up with company insiders and others who claim to know of wrongdoing by suppliers to the Texas Medicaid program, the state over the last decade has recovered more than $1 billion from suits accusing drug manufacturers and health care providers of overpricing and fraud.
Churchill Downs, the most famous Thoroughbred racetrack and home of the Kentucky Derby, sued the Texas Racing Commission in an attempt to stop the racing commission's enforcement of a law that makes it illegal for Texans to bet unless they are in-person at a racetrack.
A plain reading of the Texas Constitution’s requirement that taxes be “equal and uniform” should sound the death knell for the state’s revised franchise tax, a lawyer for food and beverage giant Nestle USA told the Texas Supreme Court. Not so fast, said the state’s lawyer. The Texas Legislature has authority to pick winners and losers by distinguishing among classifications of businesses.
Justices ponder whether Austin TV reporter's focus on neurosurgeon's disciplinary case, malpractice suits led to defamatory broadcast.
Hired by rig owner Transocean just days after the deadly Deepwater Horizon explosion, Rachel Giesber Clingman approached the case with her trademark relentless preparation. Her early work proved critical, as she faced a maze of complex litigation, Congressional hearings and the challenge of leading a team of independent trial lawyers. For Clingman, the case she is reluctant to discuss is the high point of a 20-year career, showcasing, and at times testing, the skills that have propelled her from a small Texas Hill Country town to her current position, at age 45, as the go-to defender of energy companies in trouble.
A demoted Parkland Memorial surgeon urged the justices to protect government employees who report wrongdoing through internal channels.
For a small oil and gas company like Dallas-based Longview Energy, the chance to obtain a lease in the red-hot Eagle Ford Shale was an opportunity that doesn’t come along every day. So it was a huge disappointment in 2010 when a promising lease of 46,000 acres was rejected by two of the company’s directors, representatives of The Huff Energy Fund, a New Jersey private equity company that owns 39 percent of Longview. What Longview did not know is that three days earlier, the very same land had been secured by a portfolio group that was 99 percent owned by the equity fund. Now, a South Texas judge has awarded Longview Energy the rights to the land valued at more than $500 million. It is one of the largest judgments ever involving the Eagle Ford play.
The Texas Supreme Court threw out a $46 million award to a man who was crushed by a rolling U-Haul truck, finding that evidence of safety problems in Canadian trucks was improperly admitted in a Dallas County trial. The justices said there is enough evidence for a re-trial on negligence and actual damages, but rendered a take-nothing judgment on the jury’s gross negligence findings and punitive damages. The six-person jury’s initial award of $84 million in the case was the fifth largest verdict in the nation in 2008, according to Dunn & Bradstreet. V&E's Tom Leatherbury represents U-Haul.
Court rejects argument by government and Shell that case should be barred because whistleblowers were federal auditors.
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