Report finds past year's Texas high court rulings lopsided

Foundation says dissention rare among justices

By Tama Swan

Published: Thursday, October 7, 2004

Updated: Friday, January 9, 2009

Nathan Brown

Dan Lambe, executive director of the Texas Watch Foundation, presents a list of the 10 worst Texas Supreme Court case decisions as compiled in the organization´s year-in-review of the court, "Facing a Stacked Deck: Families at the Texas Supreme Court." According to the report, Texas families, consumers and small businesses won only six cases in the 2003-04 term.

Texas Supreme Court justices lack diversity in philosophy and experience, the Texas Watch Foundation's Court Watch program said Wednesday.

Its conclusion is based on a study of the 2003-04 term, which Texas Watch said shows the court sided in favor of insurance, government and corporate defendants in more than 82 percent of cases.

"The level of conformity is, right now, unsurpassed. The justices of this court vote in complete lockstep with one another," said Dan Lambe, executive director of Texas Watch.

He said there were only seven dissenting opinions the entire term.

Texas Supreme Court spokesman Osler McCarthy said the foundation's analysis is unreliable.

"It takes the court's decisions out of context and blows them out of proportion," McCarthy said.

Of the 68 cases, the foundation isolated 10 in which consumers lost against insurance companies, doctors, corporations or government entities, calling them the "Terrible 10."

McCarthy said the foundation "reaches" to call them unfair, and in four of the cases, the court was merely

correcting errors, not addressing new questions of law.

One "Terrible 10" case involved a mental hospital that failed to remove all belongings from a patient on court-ordered suicide watch. When the man killed himself with a bar from his walker and a pair of

suspenders, the family sued the hospital for negligence.

The court found the hospital didn't provide the man with anything "inherently unsafe" and was not negligent.

But Lambe maintains the court is legislating from the bench, reshaping Texas law to benefit insurance and corporate interests and voting in unison.

Alex Albright, associate dean at the UT School of Law, said just looking at statistics doesn't justify such accusations.

"You have to analyze the opinion to understand why the cases were decided the way they were," she said.

Albright also said the court's Republican makeup doesn't explain its voting record.

"We've had Republican courts that were splintered," she said. "This one just isn't."

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment

I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.