Women lawyers who threw their hats in the ring to run for judge this primary season made a good bet.
As Texas voters in the Democratic Primary hit the polls Tuesday, it appears they picked female judge candidates.
Female Democratic challengers ousted five incumbent male judges in Houston, two in Austin and one in San Antonio. In the statewide races for the Texas Supreme Court and Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, women also beat their male primary opponents to win the Democratic nominations. This gender sweep was a Democratic Party phenomenon, and didn’t happen in Republican primary judicial races.
Statistics show that incumbent judges across Texas enjoy an advantage when they run for reelection. Nearly 70% of the incumbent judges running for reelection this year sailed to another term with absolutely no contest in their primaries or the general election.
This year in Texas, 145 of 341 total judicial candidates, or 43%, had no opponent in either their party primary or the November general election. Among them, 136 were incumbent judges seeking reelection, and all but seven were running for district court benches.
Judicial election observers say that these numbers show how difficult it can be to unseat an incumbent judge–who might be good at his or her job, or at least good enough not to draw the ire of the local bar who would fund the expensive campaign of a challenger.
The whistleblowers who have accused Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton of crimes in office have raised serious allegations, but any prosecution based on their complaint is likely to face an uphill battle, according to criminal law experts.
Pages and pages of details of the criminal allegations became public last week when four of the seven former top executives sued Paxton’s office under the Texas Whistleblowers Act, alleging Paxton retaliated against them and fired them after they reported his conduct to law enforcement.
Texas Lawyer asked three criminal law experts with decades of experience as prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers to read the lawsuit and analyze the criminal allegations against Paxton.
While the allegations are hefty enough to warrant a full investigation, lawyers said that prosecuting Paxton would be difficult.
A pink beanie with cat ears that she called her “pussyhat” while talking about reproductive health care has brought a public admonition for former Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt. But a prominent First Amendment attorney said he thinks the sanction is unconstitutional.
Eckhardt, who resigned this year to run—and win—a race for the Texas Senate, was presiding over a Travis County Commissioners Court meeting in January 2017 when she wore the hat, said a Dec. 4 public admonition that the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct released publicly Tuesday. Her sanction also mentions a 2019 comment by Eckhardt about a tree falling on Gov. Greg Abbott.
Eckhardt said she needed to “get my cat ears going here for this one,” when she talked about a proclamation that supported reproductive health care. Eckhardt’s pussy hat “could be perceived as undignified, offensive and inappropriate,” the sanction said.
Experts say it’s unlikely that a petition seeking disbarment of Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, for allegedly lying about election fraud and inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection would spur bar prosecutors to launch discipline cases.
But one of the seven Yale Law School students who organized the petition, which has garnered nearly 11,000 signatures in five days, said the senators’ words and actions were unprecedented, and it’s important that bar associations take the petition’s claims seriously.
“We think there is plenty of information in the public record that demonstrates they have lied repeatedly to the American public,” said Daniel Ki, a third-year student who helped organize the petition.
When it comes to laws making it harder to sue over COVID-19 exposure, Texas lawmakers during this year’s legislative session will get the chance to join other states and the federal government.
Behind the scenes of the legislative session, a coalition of tort reform lobbyists and business associations are putting the final touches on a bill that would protect health care providers, many types of businesses, manufacturers and educational institutions from getting sued because of the ongoing pandemic.
The measure is likely to face pushback from plaintiffs attorneys who say there’s no flood of COVID-19 litigation. Also, the chances of passage are less than in other years, because Texas lawmakers are facing a rash of emergencies stemming from the pandemic that will take priority while also coping with infection control measures that could slow down bills as they wind through the legislative process.
Brides and grooms whose festivities were sidelined by the coronavirus are mad about not getting refunds from their wedding venues, and they’re not going to take it.
Across Texas and other states, the unhappy couples or their parents have been filing lawsuits against wedding venues, seeking refunds of their deposits.
This wedding litigation is a subcategory of a much larger litigation trend that’s emerged because of COVID-19. In lawsuits and class actions across the nation, plaintiffs are suing all types of companies—airlines, colleges or universities, health clubs, concert operators, conference organizers, even a children’s dance studio and food caterer—to get their money back for coronavirus-caused cancellations.
“I’ve seen a lot of them,” said Adam Webb, partner in Webb, Klase & Lemond in Atlanta. “The list goes on and on. I’m sure it’s going to get into many industries.”
Lawrence Barber, who practiced in Odessa for 58 years and developed a fierce reputation for battling hard for his clients in court, died Dec. 12 of COVID-19.
Barber likely contracted COVID-19 in early November from one of his criminal-defense clients, who was brought from the local jail to the Ector County Courthouse for a pretrial conference in the courtroom of 244th District Judge James Rush of Odessa. The client tested positive for the virus, and the next week, Barber was hospitalized. He died after about a month in the hospital.
Using Google Forms, I designed a survey that asked questions about how the pandemic had impacted attorneys’ ability to attract clients, file new cases, and earn money. We sent the survey out nationally and received over 300 responses. I used a spreadsheet, pivot tables and pie chart graphics to analyze the results.
Here is the series of articles I wrote based on the survey. The outcome showed a stark impact on lawyers’ ability to earn money during the pandemic.
In a national survey of 292 lawyers, 59% of respondents said their income has decreased because of COVID-19 disruptions, while 34% said their income had stayed the same during the pandemic.
In a national survey of attorneys, 91% of family law attorneys and 80% of criminal law attorneys reported that their income has decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of respondents had lost upward of 80% of their earnings.
The coronavirus pandemic has drastically impacted lawyer income, but not every practice area is hurting the same. Debt counsel and contract attorneys seem to be the best off, compared to other practice areas.
In a national survey, 58% of car wreck lawyers said their income stayed the same during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it flips on the head in terms of future income expectations. There were 71% who expected a future drop in earnings. Why?
I created a system using Google Forms to email out an online questionnaire to all of the candidates who were running in contested races in the Texas primary in March, primary runoffs in July and in November’s general election.
Texas Lawyer published hundreds of Q&A articles with the candidates, organized them into voter guides, and we informed our readers about election results. Here is a sampling of the election coverage, which was wildly popular with our readers.
Hundreds of attorneys and judges are seeking votes in judicial elections across Texas. Here’s what the candidates have to say about that mission and their vision for state courts.
In the Democratic Primary, Jim Sharp, Dinesh Singhal and Veronica Rivas-Molloy are competing in the race for Justice, Place 3. In the Democratic Primary, Amparo Monique Guerra and Tim Hootman are competing in the race for Justice, Place 5. In the Republican Primary, Terry Adams, Chad Bridges, James Lombardino and Levi J. Benton are competing in the race for Justice, Place 5.
