Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Former Texas solicitor general Kyle Hawkins is joining the litigation boutique Lehotsky Keller as head of its Texas appellate practice group. As Texas SG Hawkins argued four times before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hawkins had been with Gibson Dunn since he left as solicitor general last year.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal justices on Monday criticized their colleagues and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for the handling of the long-running death-penalty case.
Houston’s 14th Court of Appeals has reversed a $7 million arbitration award in an attorney-fees dispute because the arbitrator failed to disclose he had been an expert witness in litigation involving the party who selected a list of arbitrators. The court found the nondisclosure constituted “evident partiality” under Texas law.
Court officials say it is the first time in U.S. history when a chief judge of a federal appeals court and a state supreme court chief justice have married.
The Supreme Court also denied certiorari Monday in two mandatory bar cases – one from Michigan and the other from Oklahoma. The actions may slow the momentum of nationwide “bar wars,” but other challenges could be likely.
Plaintiffs, objecting to the San Antonio City Council’s rejection of the restaurant chain’s location inside a San Antonio International Airport concourse, sued under a state law the Texas Legislature specially passed missed a point – the law was not retroactive. But the council’s action came well before the Legislature’s. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court to allow repleading to establish jurisdictional facts – and maybe give the plaintiffs another bite at a chicken sandwich.
At issue is a decades-long dispute over the meaning of a clause in the FAA. Lawyers for the Dallas-based airline go before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to assert that its baggage loaders and supervisors can be required to undergo arbitration when they file employment complaints.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has decided that payments by oil exporters into an oil-spill remediation fund are unconstitutional export taxes. But the holding held not so much because one judge concurred only in the judgment and one dissented, evidently robbing the decision of precedential value.
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