There is a new appellate law blog to add to your feed readers. Kendall Gray has been working toward the launch of The Appellate Record for some time. Today, I got a tweet announcing that it was finally live.

So check it out. His first few posts cover a little of everything.

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File this under “be careful what you ask for.”

A group of class-action plaintiffs has filed a federal lawsuit demanding that the Texas Supreme Court issue a more prompt ruling on the pending state court appeal challenging their class certification.  The plaintiffs’ contention is that their federal constitutional rights are being violated by not being able to [...]

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While we’re in the process of moving to electronic briefs, perhaps the time has come to rethink how we record trial court proceedings.

A recent post on CourTex raises that question and links to a report from a national court administration group that suggests digital recording for trials.

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The Court was scheduled to hear argument next week in In re Texas Attorney, No. 09-0277, a case about what powers the Board of Disciplinary Appeals has to oversee initial attorney disciplinary proceedings before they are complete — the power asserted here, as I understand it, was akin to mandamus review of a trial court.

Even [...]

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The Texas Tribune has an article today about the challenge in the Republican primary to incumbent Justice Felipe Reyna of the Waco Court of Appeals. Justice Reyna was appointed by Governor Perry in 2003 and reelected in 2004.

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The challenge to Texas’s parental-termination system in the US Supreme Court, which I first wrote about in this post, has come to a quiet end.

The case became notable when the US Supreme Court formally called for the views of the Texas state solicitor general, believed to be the first such request. The Texas SG [...]

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Most commentary about today’s Citizens United decision will focus on congressional and presidential elections.

But the decision may hit closer to home. Professor Rick Hasen brings some attention to the effect that Citizens United may have on judicial elections, especially in light of Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal:

The ways out of this box [...]

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Court watchers in Texas have a unique resource in CourTex, a blog maintained by Carl Reynolds, the director of Texas’s Office of Court Administration.

In a recent post, Carl relayed some new data analyzed in his office about the frequency of jury trials in Texas. For the past three years, roughly half of one percent [...]

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This will be the second election cycle for SCOTXblog.

To help readers follow and make sense of the Texas Supreme Court campaigns, I’ve added a page about the 2010 Texas Supreme Court Elections through a link on the menu bar.

I will be adding new resources and links as I get them. As always, [...]

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David White over at the Law and Insurance blog wrote yesterday about a recent Fifth Circuit decision that narrowly construed the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Mid-Continent Insurance Co. v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., 236 S.W.3d 765 (Tex. 2007) docket and briefs.

David’s post, titled “Federal Court Refuses to Extend Mid-Continent Ruling to Defense Costs”, is [...]

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Disputing has a this helpful recap of the Texas Supreme Court’s arbitration cases from the year 2009.1

How many of those cases could there be, from one court about one issue? The answer, so far, is an even dozen.

The case tapped as “[p]erhaps the most significant” of these arbitration cases was In re Morgan Stanley, [...]

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On Friday, the Court requested briefing on the merits in more than twenty pending cases. Through that link, you can see the full list or subscribe to an RSS feed for updates about similar orders. 1

The Court is not expected to issue any (non-emergency) orders this holiday week. The SCOTXblog sidebar also shows the [...]

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