Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
The Texas Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit from a woman who was severely injured in a small plane crash in North Texas. The court found that she failed to produce evidence that the Austrian manufacturer of the plane’s engine specifically intended its product to enter the Texas stream of commerce.
Roughly one month after adding former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht to its ranks, the firm has tapped Jeff Oldham to be the firmwide chair of its appellate section. Oldham had most recently been an appellate partner in Bracewell’s Houston office.
Lawyers for about 20,000 Texans and Texas businesses have asked the Texas Supreme Court to revive their Winter Storm Uri-related lawsuits and allow their negligence claims against power generators such as Luminant, NRG Power and Calpine to go to trial. In court documents filed Thursday, Dallas appellate law expert Ann Saucer told the justices that a 2023 decision by the First Court of Appeals in Houston that the power generators are immune from the Winter Storm Uri lawsuits “relied on invented facts” and “stifles the common law and threatens legal ossification and economic stagnation” and needs to be reversed. (Feb. 2021 AP file photo)
In their career debuts, two newly minted University of Texas law school graduates and incoming Kirkland & Ellis associates faced pointed judicial questioning from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in a prison conditions case. Gabrielle Olubanke Howells and Lizeth Badillo Garcia spoke with The Texas Lawbook about rising to the rare occasion of presenting oral arguments in a federal appeals case before even taking the bar exam.
In April, a Louisiana state jury decided that Houston-based Chevron Corp. owes Plaquemines Parish $740 million for harm done to the local coastal environment by Chevron and its corporate predecessors during oil and gas exploration more than seven decades ago. On Thursday (May 29), the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to consider a grant of certiorari for an argument by Chevron and other oil companies that the case shouldn't have been heard by a state court in the first place. The Texas Lawbook backgrounds the case.
Justice James P. Sullivan wrote the court’s unanimous 8-0 ruling in favor of American Midstream, holding the $6.1 million win for Rainbow Energy Marketing cannot stand. Justice Sullivan explained that when a Harris County trial judge “impermissibly blue-penciled extra words” into the parties’ contract, it caused a “cascade of errors that we now correct.” Justice John P. Devine did not participate in the decision.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock highlighted deficiencies in the plaintiffs’ expert testimony on the question of whether a pipe fabrication plant’s drainage system contributed to flooding of 30 homes in Matagorda County.
In a seven-page concurrence, Fifth Circuit Judge James C. Ho accused the U.S. Supreme Court of affording “special treatment” to “favored litigants” in a case involving deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. And he stood up for U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, writing that he had "conducted himself in a reasonable and indeed admirable manner,” calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s criticism of his actions in the underlying case “unwarranted and unfortunate.”
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