The Medina-Devine runoff is July 31st

Compared to 2010 (when there was the excitement of an open seat and a wide-open primary), there has been relatively little press coverage of this year’s Texas Supreme Court elections. One of those contests is now in a runoff for the Republican nomination: incumbent Justice David Medina against challenger (and former judge) John Devine.

In the March 29th primary, Justice Medina got 39.0% of the vote, Devine got 32.2%, and Joe Pool Jr. got 28.8%.

On Friday, Morgan Smith of the Texas Tribune published a good overview of the politicking for this seat: “Questions Of Qualifications, Ethics in Texas Court Race”.

Justice Willett writes about the ACA decision

The Houston Chronicle published an article by Justice Willett titled “Parsing the court’s decision on Obamacare” that puts the decision in a political context, as well as discussing “the judicial activism canard.”

CLE on “Electronic Briefs”

I’ll be speaking about electronic briefs this Friday at the State Bar’s “summer school” course in Galveston. If you’re there — and the weather forces you to stay inside for my talk — please say hello.

It’s amazing how fast this transition has happened in Texas. Two years ago, there was resistance to preparing a courtesy PDF copy for the Texas Supreme Court. Now, we are moving quickly toward mandatory e-filing in all civil appeals statewide.

An update on changes to Texas court websites

According to TexParte, the Texas Supreme Court switched its internal systems over to TAMES yesterday, and the public website should make the jump “later this week.”.

I’ve started to prepare SCOTXblog for the transition. This weekend, I wrote some WordPress plugins to remap the links in my blog archives to point to more stable locations that I can control. If you see broken links on my blog after the TAMES transition, please let me know. And if you run a blog about Texas law and find your own links breaking, feel free to call.