If you subscribe to SCOTXblog by email, you’ll see a new format today, as well as a new delivery schedule. Going forward, the blog is using a new email provider. The update emails will be sent weekly on Monday mornings, collecting posts from the previous week. The format should be much more pleasant, the burden on your inbox lighter, and the service more reliable.

If you (like me) also like quick updates during the week, I encourage you to check out the blog’s RSS feed or Twitter feed. Those are continuing as before. And you’re of course always welcome to stop by the blog’s webpage.

Whenever I hit “Publish,” I’m very conscious that my post is about to be read by a unique group of Texas attorneys and others interested in the courts. Thanks again for reading and subscribing.

SCOTXblog will be undergoing some major construction this summer.

The timing is driven by the imminent launch of TAMES in the Texas Supreme Court. The Houston courts have already launched the system, and so I have a better sense of how these changes will affect the websites that I’ve built to follow the Court.

As you’d expect, I will be watching the TAMES rollout as closely as anyone. It will include many of the features I built for DocketDB — along with some others that no one outside of the courts themselves could have implemented (like copies of motions and letters).

They call the internet a “web” for a reason

Here’s a rough sketch of how my Texas court-watching projects fit together:

On this chart, the blog you’re reading is near the middle. My personal court-tracking database is at the bottom, and you can see how some of those connections flow through to public sites (like the blog or the public areas of DocketDB).

As crazy as this chart looks, it seems to work. Some of the scrapers have been running for more than five years with very little modification.

The future of DocketDB and SCOTXblog

While TAMES is a great deal for the public, it has a cost for me. My private court-tracking system is built on a foundation of “scrapers”, tuned to understand the old website. When the new site goes live, the Court’s docket information will be shifted to new pages and put in new formats. The existing scrapers will not know how to find or work with this information, so data will stop flowing into my private database, which in turn will freeze the public version of DocketDB. ¹

For that reason, I anticipate that the public version of DocketDB (including registered accounts) will also wind down soon after the Court switches over to TAMES. That site needs a consistent flow of accurate data, and I won’t have that until I build a new set of scrapers for my own tracking system.

My first priority is fixing SCOTXblog. The easiest approach would be to cut the connections between the blog and my court-tracking software, leaving just a basic blog in place. But that’s not my style.

I’d much rather build a new platform for SCOTXblog that can better support the kind of case updates and articles that I’d like to write — and that, I hope, you’ll want to read.

I’ll update you as I make progress. In the meantime, you may see some longtime blog features start to disappear or stop working (like the feed of news articles or briefing requests). If you see something that looks more broken than usual, please let me know. And, of course, please stay tuned. I look forward to sharing the new site once it’s ready.

1. This has happened on a smaller scale at various times this spring, as the Court has made small improvements to its website. Even tiny changes on the Texas Supreme Court website — such as putting the description for a particular kind of docket-sheet entry into plainer language — confuses the scrapers. I’ve been able to make small fixes as these have come to my attention. The TAMES rollout will be an order of magnitude (or two) more complex. [↩]

You may have seen the “stat pack” offered by SCOTUSblog with voting statistics for the Justices.

Its wedge-shaped voting chart is familiar — and, for a time, it became a staple of Texas CLE programs as well. Following that path, I prepared some of these charts for an Austin appellate bar program in March.

The experience made me more conscious of two weaknesses in these charts.

First, the author often must choose what universe of cases to show — all opinions, all signed opinions, only divided opinions. The easy choice is “all opinions,” but it gives very little signal compared to noise. In other words, the unanimous opinions push up the percentages and hide disagreements in the more challenging cases.

Second, even with a background in economics and math, I was bothered just seeing a percentage showing that two Justices agreed 60% of the time. That top-level statistic is fine for people who just want to make a broad-brushed assertion about the general makeup of the Court. But as an advocate I wanted to know which cases led to that disagreement. That is where a serious advocate can start to learn how two Justices might approach a problem differently.

Announcing DocketDB voting tables for 2010

I finally have a set of voting charts that make me happy. The basic layout should look familiar.

But this chart is dynamic — you can choose to focus on the scope of cases you want (all opinions? only signed opinions? only those with a dissent?):

You can also choose the types of disagreement you want to highlight (disagreements in opinion? or only in judgment?):

And the real kicker for me: You can click on a cell in the table and drill down to a page that shows — for each pair of Justices — the specific cases on which they agreed in the opinions, agreed in the judgment, or did not agree in the judgment.

These detail pages show keywords about each case (when they are present in DocketDB). You can also navigate directly from here to each relevant opinion that led to the split.

Where to find the voting charts

The dynamic 2010 Texas Supreme Court voting analysis charts are available to anyone who has registered for DocketDB. (If you registered before and have forgotten your login, you can get access through this link. If you haven’t registered, you can register here.)

Once you’ve logged in, look under your “Research Tools” menu in the top left of the menu bar. You should see the new “Vote Analysis” option.

I’ve always reserved some of the DocketDB features for the professional subscribers who help support the site financially. With this set of voting tables, I have reserved the data for 2006 to 2009 for those supporters.

For the future…

I haven’t yet decided on a next step, but I’ll mention two further enhancements that could be built on this same set of data:

1. Choosing cases by subject matter, rather than a whole term. Back in March, I was asked if it was possible to look just at the cases involving a particular issue. The answer now is that, yes, it is possible. A chart can be made for any set of cases, defined on any characteristic in the database. (The trick is defining those sets of cases, or creating a tool that lets users create their own sets of cases.)

2. Graphic representation of voting patterns. I’m thinking of the slides that I presented in March 2010, showing the relative voting position of the Justices in 5-4 cases. (Here’s the slide (PDF) I made for the U.S. Supreme Court, to give you an idea.) The data that powers today’s dynamic voting tables should be able to power those same graphics. (I used a different computer to build those charts, and the trick here would be folding this into the main DocketDB code in a way that works for the web.)

Those two enhancements could be combined to show, for example, a graphic representation in how the Justices vote on cases about statutory construction, or civil procedure, or medical-malpractice cases.

As always, I very much welcome your input about what new features would be helpful to your practice.

As regular readers know, the Texas Supreme Court is on its summer break. The fall calendar is set, and the next conference of the Justices is not scheduled until mid-August.

With my SCOTXblog time, I’ve been working on a new project that I hope to launch by the end of the summer. Yes, it’s also related to the Texas Supreme Court; I will announce it on the blog when it’s ready.

Along the way, I’ve been learning a few programming tricks. With one of them, I’ve updated SCOTXblog so that its layout rearranges as you make your browser window narrower or wider.

But these improvements do not, unfortunately, show up in Internet Explorer. Read more about the new design

I’ve set up a new Archives Page that displays all of the blog’s previous posts by date or by category.

Whenever you want to scan our older posts, the “Archives” link can be found on the right-hand side of the menu bar.

I’ve just moved the blog to a new hosting provider. In theory, everything should work just the same. If you experience any problems with the website or your RSS feeds over the next few days, please let me know.

Some of you may have tuned in on Friday to see my coverage of last week’s extensive order list.

I left town very early Friday for a family emergency. I’m still needed there, and with some case deadlines looming next week, I may not be posting for just a little while.

If there’s something you think the blog should cover on my return, please drop me a note.

You might have noticed a new heading in the sidebar — “Cases in the News” — collecting stories about Texas Supreme Court cases published on other blogs, newspapers, and journals.¹

These links are stored by DocketDB and are part of my ongoing effort to automate myself out of a blogging job. DocketDB already reports the Texas Supreme Court’s briefing requests, and now it provides a framework to share articles and analysis pieces about the Court’s decisions and pending cases.

I’ll still select articles to discuss in full blog posts, but this will be a faster way to share articles about the Texas Supreme Court that I otherwise couldn’t.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of these articles at DocketDB.

1. If I see an interesting article, I add it to the list. If you see an interesting article, please let me know. [↩]

You can now get SCOTXblog by email.

The fastest updates will still come through the RSS feed. But the emails will give you a digest of the most recent posts.

A year ago this week, I hit “publish” on a short introductory post. Since then, I have (apparently) cranked out 267 more posts — which, through the ups and downs of activity at the Court, has been about once per weekday.

That’s more often than I thought I would write. But, it turns out, the easiest times to write have been the busiest (both for the Court and for me).

And I want to thank you for reading. Although the internet traffic spikes when a court case makes the national news (or when an amusing post gets picked up by the “lawyer entertainment” industry), it’s the readers who keep coming back that keep me writing.

My email box is always open to suggestions for topics, for improvements to the blog, or pretty much anything you might want to share.

Thanks again.

This blog often mentions the Texas Supreme Court’s new requests for full briefing on the merits, which, as court watchers know, can signal what issues are on the Court’s radar.

There is a new way to follow those requests and find cases that matter to you. In the blog’s left-hand sidebar is a list of the Texas Supreme Court’s most recent requests for full briefing (those made in the past month).

You can view those requests on this blog, or you can subscribe in your own RSS reader. This list is provided by DocketDB, a private docket-tracking website.

What’s DocketDB?

DocketDB is a web-based legal research tool that, for now, is focused on the Texas Supreme Court.

It’s also a project that I’ve been very personally involved in. The database that powers DocketDB is a grown-up version of a court-tracking database I first put together on my laptop. And the tracking and analysis tools available on DocketDB are aimed at the types of questions that have come up in my own appellate practice. I’ve thought that others might want to use the same tools. To make that possible, I’ve developed DocketDB as a separate website unconnected from my law practice.

To me, the key is that DocketDB tracks and isolates the Texas Supreme Court’s active docket. DocketDB follows all pending petitions, highlighting the ones that have lingered long enough to be candidates for the Court’s “submarine” docket, as well as the cases submitted on oral argument. It also tracks amicus filings and attorney appearances, so you can flexibly search to see which cases have drawn the most interest, and from whom. These tools are designed to let you see across the Court’s docket.

Why does it matter what’s happening in these other cases? When the Court grants petitions, it weighs their importance against that larger backdrop. And when the Court resolves particularly thorny legal questions, it takes account of the other petitions that have raised similar issues. DocketDB tries to show the docket from that broader perspective.¹ It’s a tool to help you make better strategic choices. How you use it is up to you.

A few of DocketDB’s simpler resources will be open to the public, including the list of new briefing requests. The more advanced features, however, will be reserved for subscribers.²

1. This perspective can be useful at every stage. Obviously, if you are filing in the Texas Supreme Court, you want to know how your case fits into the larger picture. In the courts of appeals, knowing what issues are pending can help shape your strategy. And in the trial courts, knowing the hot-button issues gives you more information about how the legal foundation might shift beneath your case. [↩]
2. There are some practical reasons for this. Its tools are customizable for each user, with each user having a tracking list of “starred” cases, a private set of “labels” or tags that can be assigned to group related cases, and private notes that can be added. And, as I’m learning, running this type of internet service takes far more resources than does a humble blog. [↩]

If you are a regular reader of the blog, you may have noticed the sudden drop in postings last week. While the Court was active, the blog went quiet and did so without explanation.

Last week, I put aside the blog — and the practice of law as a whole — to spend time with my father, and then with my family. My father had not been well for some time, and he passed away last Wednesday. Some of you heard the news, or part of it, through some other means, and I very much appreciated your concerns, thoughts, and prayers.

A friend kindly volunteered to make last Friday’s post for me. ¹ I greatly appreciated not having to think about law at all last week. If I can convince my friend to post again, then I will make a more formal introduction. For now, it’s just a thank you.

1. This post was made under the name “Don’s Understudy,” an attribution that appears in the RSS version but not, as of yet, the main blog. I’ll tweak the blog at some point to show authorship. [↩]