Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
The Texas Supreme Court held that the two companies seeking to take private property for the controversial Dallas-to-Houston high-speed rail have a statutory right to exercise eminent domain to take right-of-way for the 240-mile rail line.
Two grants, consolidated for argument, raise facts and issues that will capture headlines, but both raise questions under the citizens participation act, the pervasive interlocutory scheme intended to provide a quick dismissal ramp for claims based on free-speech issues. Both cases focus on efforts to create anti-abortion “sanctuary” cities throughout Texas. And both involve an ordinance, the first of several, declaring Waskom to be a sanctuary city. But the proponents didn’t stop there.
The court answered certified questions from the Fifth Circuit asking it to interpret state liquor laws banning public corporations from owning package-store permits in Texas. But, in doing so, justices determine an exempt corporation, exempted by a grandfather clause that allows a public corporation to own liquor stores, should not forfeit its exemption by selling interests to ease debt in a Chapter 11 reorganization.
The Texas Supreme Court has held a challenge to an "election integrity" law as too broad in its sweep to limit how Texas voting officials "solicit" mail-in ballots.
The plaintiffs, according to court records, seek more than $100 million in damages for wrongful death, physical impairment, disfigurement, mental anguish and loss of use and enjoyment of real property. Houston's 14th Court of Appeals dismissed some claims against Union Pacific but sent the case back to Harris County District Court to determine the fate of the others.
Next up in the lineup challenging the 2011 sale of the Houston Astros: the Texas Supreme Court. After the court granted review of former Astros owner Drayton McLane’s petition contesting lower court holdings that the new owner might have paid too much, a principal issue on deck is whether the sale can be reversed.
First the Texas Medical Board temporarily slapped an Austin neurologist with a sanction for unprofessional patient contact. But only when a judge cleared him of the allegations did his fight really begin to rid a national database of the sanction that even the medical board dismissed. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled enough was enough.
In First Amendment decisions like the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent injunction stopping enforcement of a Texas law governing social media platforms, and other free-speech challenges for years, Vinson & Elkins senior partner Tom Leatherbury has been front and center. Leatherbury, widely regarded as a leading media and appellate lawyer in the state and who founded a media law clinic at SMU, tells The Texas Lawbook that First Amendment challenges never seem to end.
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