Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Who is representing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in all of his various legal battles? The make-up of his defense teams have varied case-to-case, but some attorneys have been retained in almost all of the lawsuits Paxton faces. The Lawbook breaks it down.
At an Austin news conference, lawyers Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell promise a protracted fight to acquit the beleaguered attorney general. They also poked fun at the lead impeachment prosecutors, Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin, saying the pair were introduced earlier by the Texas House “like they were the homecoming king and queen.”
Lawmakers upended the state’s system of elected district court judges and regional intermediate appellate courts as business interests won a new court system for complex business disputes. The 2023 legislature rejected efforts to cut local governments out of public nuisance suits and weaken the state’s anti-SLAPP statute.
Six amicus briefs have been filed with the Fifth Circuit in the case where IBM is trying to undo a $1.6 billion judgment entered against it after a bench trial before U.S. District Judge Gray Miller. BMC had filed a cross appeal in the lawsuit but dropped that fight in April to “simplify and shorten the proceedings.”
A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit has asked the state’s high court to answer two certified questions that will determine if two flight attendants, Marvin Sanders and Matthew Sodrok, can proceed with their suit against Boeing over the alleged malfunction of a smoke detector on one of the company’s planes.
In an “exceedingly rare” move, as a dissenting justice noted, the case was not first decided by a three-justice panel before the en banc court considered it. The court’s May 18 divided decision generated two dissents and likely set the stage for an appeal to the Texas Supreme Court.
In this edition of Litigation Roundup, Kinder Morgan gets a win at the Texas Supreme Court in a tax fight with a school district, a jury sides with the widow of a NASA astronaut in a probate dispute involving space artifacts, and a Houston company is accused of monopolizing an ERCOT savings program.
The Senate has now approved the House’s revisions to the bill that would form the new Fifteenth Court of Appeals for commercial cases. Once the two chambers of the Legislature sign the final version of the bill, the creation of that new court awaits only the governor’s signature.
Before long, that court’s justices will take office and its docket will begin to fill with cases. As a brand new institution, the Fifteenth Court will have no precedent of its own to apply in those cases. With apologies for the pun, that court will face an “unprecedented” situation.
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