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This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court released Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Company. The case involves facts that are almost too extreme to believe. Massey was appealing a multi-million judgment and decided to help its chances at the West Virginia Supreme Court by spending approximately $3 million to help elect...

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of mandatory, pre-dispute arbitration. In fact, I've probably written on it more than anything else. Now, maybe the griping from me and others has done some good. A Los Angeles Times story was out earlier in the week detailing the problems with...

And that raises the primary reason this all seemed so complicated. Lawyers. Layers and layers of lawyers. Bret Stephens asked in a prescient Wall Street Journal essay last November, “Why Don’t We Hang Pirates Anymore?” And the answer, he discovered, is that “there is no controlling legal authority.” A combination...

A numb er of years ago, while I was in law school, I received a call from my mom, and she started asking me about the elements of a criminal assault case in Texas. I don’t know about all of you, but this was not the question I expected from...

"A judge's job is to apply the law and, in the absence of a jury, to decide the facts of the case. This job description should not include advancing a personal or partisan agenda from the bench. When a judge brings a personal agenda or partisan commitments to the bench,...

We have a weird criminal proceeding occurring here in Travis County. In 1986, 26 year old Timothy Cole was convicted of rape by a Lubbock County jury and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Cole maintained his innocence throughout the trial. In 1995, another prisoner confessed to the crime, but...

In 2003, the Texas Legislature changed the landscape for residential construction litigation. They created the Texas Residential Construction Commission (TRCC)and also set up a "dispute resolution process" that most construction defect cases had to go through before proceeding in the court setting. The law is a disaster for homeowners. Cases...

I'm a few days behind on my magazines (actually, more than that judging by the pile on my desk) so I just got around to reading my January 5, 2009 Texas Lawyer, which contains an article entitled  DOWN MARKETS REQUIRE CREATIVE CHOICES: Use Flexible Fee Structuring To Add Clients In Tough...

Attorney and CBS News analyst Andrew Cohen had a great opinion piece Saturday calling out the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Made in America: Corporate Gall --- On Corporations Seeking to "Reform" the Very System They Broke." It's an oustanding article, and I would cut and paste the entire thing if I...

Attorney and CBS News analyst Andrew Cohen had a great opinion piece Saturday calling out the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Made in America: Corporate Gall --- On Corporations Seeking to "Reform" the Very System They Broke." It's an oustanding article, and I would cut and paste the entire thing if I...