Texas Watch—Consumer Protection. Corporate Accountability. Citizen Advocacy.

Although the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been in the spotlight in recent weeks for promoting legislation similar to the Florida “Kill at Will” law at issue in the Trayvon Martin case, for decades the organization has been quietly “ghostwriting the law” to the benefit of its big business funders and the detriment of consumers, investors and victims of corporate wrongdoing. Increased attention on the shadowy organization is revealing that ALEC’s now-notorious and since-disbanded foray into gun rights and voter suppression was a tangent from a massive, concerted campaign to set aside laws that hold corporations accountable when they pollute the environment, sell dangerous products or defraud consumers. All the more effective for its stealthy nature, ALEC’s war on corporate accountability has received only a fraction of the scrutiny the media has focused on the Kill at Will controversy.

ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force drives this agenda under a banner of “tort reform.”  A “tort” is a wrong that gives rise to a legal claim. Tort lawsuits seek to compensate victims for physical, economic and psychological harm and deter future negligence or intentional wrongdoing. Because most tort law is made at the state level and many cases are tried in state courts, ALEC’s state-focused Civil Justice Task Force is a crucial element of a broader corporate-driven “tort reform” effort.

Read More: Media Matters

Public employees, like everyone else, have accidents in the course of their duties. The public has a right to recover damages for property, physical injuries or loss of life when those accidents occur. Tort law is supposed to protect the public in cases of loss or harm.

That was the idea behind the Texas Tort Claims Act, a measure passed by the Legislature in 1969. Prior to the act, Texans could not recover damages in cases in which government employees were performing their duties.

Lawmakers also recognized that taxpayers deserve protection from frivolous and excessive lawsuits. So, additionally, the act limits the circumstances in which a governmental entity is liable for compensatory damages and caps those damages.

As Express-News staff writer John Tedesco reported, however, the caps — now $250,000 per individual — often don’t allow members of the public to fully recover actual damages. That shouldn’t be the case.

Tornadoes have ripped through North Texas, destroying homes and upending thousands of lives. Here are some tips for families and policyholders when dealing with their insurance company. Read More »

As election season approaches, candidates for the Texas Legislature will almost certainly look for ways to pitch a message of fiscal responsibility to voters. Texas once again faces a budget shortfall of billions of dollars and candidates and officeholders alike will offer plans to save the state from a fiscal crisis.

One area in which legislators should look to strengthen the state’s financial condition is combating fraud against the state government. While several mechanisms exist to identify and prosecute fraud against Texas taxpayers, much more can be done. One of the easiest and most effective changes that can be made is to adopt a “qui tam” law that applies to all areas of state government.

Qui tam laws allow whistle-blowers with knowledge of fraud against the government to file a lawsuit in the name of the state against the party alleged to have committed the fraud. The attorney general is then given the opportunity to examine the facts of the case and pursue the case if he chooses to do so. The whistle-blower is then awarded a share of the proceeds if a recovery is made on behalf of taxpayers.

Read More: Houston Chronicle

The Texas Supreme Court has a profound effect on the everyday lives of Texans. It is the court of last resort for non-criminal matters in the state. But according to a scathing report released this week by the advocacy group Texas Watch, over the last 10 years, the majority of Texas Supreme Court decisions have favored corporate interests over consumers. And the panel of judges, according to the report, has repeatedly overstepped its authority by overturning jury verdicts and interpreting the law to benefit the rich.

Listen: Texas Public Radio (Texas Matters, Segment 3)

Last August, ThinkProgress highlighted a Texas Watch report showing that the Texas Supreme Court “sided with consumers in 27 percent of cases involving an individual against a corporation or government agency — and it reversed jury verdicts in 72 percent of cases.” A new report by that same organization shows that the court’s favoritism towards corporations is now even worse.

Read More: ThinkProgress

Listen to Court Watch director Alex Winslow talk about Court Watch’s latest report with Kristen Flowers of KTRH radio in Houston.

“Texas families deserve a fair shake when they go to the courthouse. And, when they make it to the highest court in the land, they’re just not getting that fair shake.”

Woe is the injured consumer or medical patient in Texas who brings a lawsuit against a big corporation or the government. A new report out from the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Watch has taken a hard look at more than 600 decisions by the Texas Supreme Court over the past decade and found that consumers and plaintiffs are routinely taking it on the chin. And consumers are losing far more often in the court than they were before short-lived GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry became governor.

Since 2005, consumers have lost nearly 80 percent of Texas Supreme Court cases in which a consumer was pitted against a big corporation or the government. Most of the time, the consumer plaintiffs had already prevailed before a jury—the high court overturned jury verdicts in 74 percent of consumer cases, with very little dissent.

Texas Watch attributes the massive scale-tilting to the fact that the court is now dominated by judges who were appointed by Perry starting in 2000. Six of the nine judges on the all-Republican court were initially appointed by Perry. In Texas, the judges are elected, but when a vacancy occurs, a governor can appoint a judge to fill out the remaining term, a move that all but guarantees the judge will prevail in the general election. And in Texas, Republican judges who’ve wanted to retire have often done so mid-term, allowing Perry to appoint their replacements.

Read More: Mother Jones

The Texas Supreme Court over the last decade has morphed into an activist court driven by ideoloy and acting to benefit corporate interests, according to a report released today by consumer advocacy group Texas Watch.

The scathing report is the result of a review of 264 court decisions over the past 10 years and paints a picture of a court concerned only with giving more power to the powerful and trampling on the interests of Texas families in the process. The 9-judge panel, all Republican, “employs twisted logic and eviscerates long-standing precedent to achieve poltiical ends,” the report says.

Texas Watch found that when Gov. Rick Perry began making appointments in 2000, his picks made the court decidely more pro-business than it had been under George W. Bush, “subverting the rule of law from within and effectively turning the granite walls of the court into a mausoleum for plaintiffs.”

Read More: The Dallas Morning News