Justice David Medina’s biography notes that “in college he competed on the university’s karate . . . team.”.

He really wasn’t kidding.

Turns out, he recently participated in a match — with a law clerk. Tickets to the match were a featured item at the Court’s annual holiday charity auction.

Thanks to the power of YouTube, you can watch from the comfort and relative safety of your office.

• Preliminaries to the match and Round  1 (2:31)

• Round 2 (1:33)

• Round 3 and announcement of winner (2:33)

If you can’t decide whether to click on one of those links, you may want to read how the matches are scored:

Scoring: 1 point for punches or kicks to the body and punches to the head or face; 2 points for kicks to the head; jumps or spins add a point, so 3 points for spin kicks to the head (2 for spin kicks to the body).

Barely a week later, the Texas Supreme Court decided the case. Divided 5-3, the Court held that the plaintiff (who was an assignee of someone else’s claims) was not an adequate class representative.

The plaintiff filed a motion for rehearing and a demand that the Texas Supreme Justice who authored the majority opinion be recused. Both motions were denied in May.

Today, the federal district court resolved the federal case, dismissing it as moot now that the state court process is over.

In Pastor Rick Barr and Philemon Homes, Inc. v. City of Sinton, No. 06-0074, the Texas Supreme Court adopted a framework for testing the legality of government burdens on the freedom of exercise of religion by a prison halfway house. (A few articles about that case are collected on DocketDB.)

This month, the Fifth Circuit has applied that same Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act to a case involving a school policy that demanded a kindergartener from a Native American background cut his hair or cover its length.

In A.A. v. Needville Independent School District (5th Cir. July 9, 2010), the court held that the school policy violated the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The panel split. Judge Higginbotham looked to Barr in construing the Texas statute broadly. Thus, even the school district’s (later) offers to let A.A. cover his long hair instead of cutting it were nonetheless substantial burdens.

Judge Jolly, in dissent, would have held that some of the school district’s “off the collar” options for the hair would not have imposed a “substantial burden” on religious exercise to trigger the act. He criticized the majority for “fram[ing] the plaintiffs’ purported religious belief not merely to be uncut long hair, but to be the visibility of hair length.”

Hat tip: Volokh, with background on state RFRA laws here.

If you have an oral argument coming up this fall, you may want to soak in the new arrangement of Justices. With the exception of Justice Hecht and the Chief Justice, everyone else has shuffled places.

Other coverage of Justice Lerhmann”s swearing-in ceremony this afternoon:

• Austin American-Statesman

The Tribune’s interview format is a nice hybrid between a traditional article and a transcript. It condenses and distills some key points, but also embeds short audio clips that give more context for her answers.

Judge Lehrmann will be assuming Place 3, the seat of Justice O”Neill, who a few weeks ago formally notified the Governor that she would be stepping down on June 20, 2010.

Place 3 is up for election this fall, and Justice Lehrmann is already the Republican nominee for that seat. On the fall ballot, she is opposed by Justice Jim Sharp (D) and William Strange (L).

More links about the election, including a short Q&A with soon-to-be Justice Lehrmann, are collected on our Elections 2010 page.

According to the Blog of Legal Times, both those things happened in Graham v. Florida, the case decided earlier this month holding that the Eighth Amendment prohibits a life-without-parole sentence for a juvenile whose crime did not involve homicide.

As part of its search for “objective indicia of national consensus,” the Court sought to fill in the gaps in a study that the inmate had offered showing that only 109 juveniles were serving such sentences nationwide.

The Court’s opinion said:

Although in the first instance it is for the litigants to provide data to aid the Court, we have been able to supplement the study’s findings. The study’s authors were not able to obtain a definitive tally for Nevada, Utah, or Virginia. … Our research shows that Nevada has five juvenile nonhomicide offenders serving life without parole sentences, Utah has none, and Virginia has eight. See Letter from Alejandra Livingston, Offender Management Division, Nevada Dept. of Corrections, to Supreme Court Library (Mar. 26, 2010) (available in Clerk of Court’s case file); Letter from Steve Gehrke, Utah Dept. of Corrections, to Supreme Court Library (Mar. 29, 2010) (same); Letter from Dr. Tama S. Celi, Virginia Dept. of Corrections, to Supreme Court Library (Mar. 30, 2010) (same). The study [submitted by the litigants] also did not note that there are six convicts in the federal prison system serving life without parole offenses for nonhomicide crimes. See Letter and Attachment from Judith Simon Garrett, U. S. Dept. of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, to Supreme Court Library (Apr. 12, 2010) (available in Clerk of Court’s case file).

This last statement apparently caught the Office of the Solicitor General off guard. The request for information did not go through OSG.

Deputy SG Neal Katyal, writing a letter to the Court soon after the decision, said his office learned of the prison system’s response to the Court “only upon the release of the Court’s decision, [because it] was submitted in response to a confidential request from Court personnel.” (Katyal’s letter is here. The emphasis is mine.)

Having learned (too late) of the request, OSG oversaw a more careful review and concluded that the federal data was wrong. None of those six federal convicts fit the category. Five of them had committed their acts as adults; the other one committed a crime that did involve homicide.

Of course, a correction in this direction — that the federal count was zero instead of six — would only have made the Graham Court’s point stronger. It did not, unlike last year’s similar error in Kennedy v. Louisiana, call the majority’s reasoning about a “national consensus” into doubt.

But for appellate advocates, it’s how the US Supreme Court gathered this data that is worth pause. The method of court officials making “confidential requests” to third parties for factual data is, (one hopes) unusual for the adversary system. A public request would have ensured that interested parties had a chance to evaluate or explain the data.

Hat tip to Volokh Conspiracy for the initial link.

What follows is the email just sent by the Court’s public information officer, Osler McCarthy:

Friday, May 7, 2010 JUSTICE O’NEILL TO LEAVE COURT JUNE 20

Justice Harriet O’Neill, who announced last year she would not seek re-election, today sent notice to Texas Governor Rick Perry of her resignation as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas effective June 20. O’Neill became the first woman elected to the Court to preside as Chief Justice, when she was the senior justice on the bench during oral argument. When she leaves, she will be the longest-serving woman justice in the Court’s history.

“I am deeply grateful for the unique opportunity to have served the people of this great state during my nearly 18-year tenure on the district court, the court of appeals and the Supreme Court of Texas,” O’Neill said. “It has been an honor to serve with men and women of the highest integrity. I hope that my service has justified the confidence that the voters have placed in me.”

“To say Justice O’Neill will be missed on this Court would be an understatement,” Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson said. “In addition to her tremendous contribution to Texas law, her legacy will be a vastly improved judicial process for abused and neglected children and a determined effort by the Legislature and attorneys across the state to improve the delivery of legal services to people who cannot afford lawyers.”

Justice O’Neill joined the Court in January 1999, having been elected the previous November. She had been a justice on Houston’s 14th District Court of Appeals and, before that, a Harris County district judge.

Explaining her decision to leave the court before her term expires in December, O’Neill said: “After careful consideration, I timed my departure to cause the least disruption to the Court’s docket.”

O’Neill spearheaded the Supreme Court’s creation of the Permanent Judicial Commission for Children, Youth and Families, a coordinated effort to improve court practice and enhance resources for children under court supervision. She was also a founding member of the Texas Access to Justice Commission, which seeks to improve the administration of justice by ensuring that people with basic civil legal needs have access to the courts, regardless of income.

Justice O’Neill will announce her future plans after June 20.

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

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 pursue their state class-action during the pendency of the appeal.¹ The appeal is Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. v. Marketing on Hold, No. 05-0748 (docket and briefs). A PDF of the federal complaint is here [2.3MB]. It names each of the nine (current) Justices in their official capacities.

If this unusual lawsuit can have a most unusual feature, it might be this: among the plaintiffs is Harris County, Texas (Texas’s most populous county) — so a local arm of Texas government is attempting to assert §1983 civil-rights case against Texas state officials. (I’ll leave that problem set for your next Fed Courts exam.)

The 45-page lawsuit just asks for unspecified “declaratory relief,” but I’m not sure what that would accomplish. On reflection, I’m not sure whether this complaint is a political stunt or an extraordinary form of appellate seppuku. It’s rarely effectively advocacy to spit at the Court that is deciding your case.

1. Paragraph 10 of the complaint claims that “[f]or nearly a year, Case No. 05-0748 has been the oldest appeal awaiting a decision at the Texas Supreme Court….” That’s not how I would describe my own docket data; I do not draw a distinction between appeals and original proceedings set for oral argument. Although my docket-tracking website is referenced in paragraph 38, I was not consulted about this complaint and cannot speak to any of its other factual allegations.