Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks on America, Mrs. Obama wrote in USA Today:

As we reaffirm our commitment to hold dear the heroism, strength and compassion we saw on Sept. 11, let’s also pledge to keep our military families in our hearts long after this anniversary has passed. These men, women and children have served valiantly in the decade since that fateful day. Now it’s up to us to serve them as well.

Amen. But while public officials are out waving the flag toward these families, federal lawyers in court are now quietly trying to expand the U.S. government’s legal immunity from exposure to medical malpractice claims brought by those very same military folks. Now, the feds want the courts to recognize a bold application of an old doctrine — an already heavily criticized old doctrine — that would bar many plaintiffs, whose loved ones serve their country, from exercising the right merely to be able to present the substance of their claims at trial.

Read More: The Atlantic

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

Read More: ThinkProgress

“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.”

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 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

“The Texas Supreme Court has marched in lock-step to consistently and overwhelmingly reward corporate defendants and the government at the expense of Texas families,” the report says.

Texas Watch says in its study, which reviewed court decisions in more than 624 cases in the past 10 years, that the trend started when Gov. Rick Perry began appointing Supreme Court justices in 2000. The report argues that data from court rulings shows that Perry’s appointees “corporatized the court.” But the court, a former justice and conservative groups disagree with the report’s conclusions, arguing that a statistical analysis doesn’t provide enough context.

The state’s highest civil court ruled in favor of defendants — mostly corporations and government entities — in about 74 percent of the 624 consumer cases brought before the panel in the last decade, according to the report.

Alex Winslow, executive director of Texas Watch, said the high court’s nine justices, who are all Republicans, are too similar to one another. Many represented corporations in court before they became justices, and 85 percent of the time, they agreed with one another.

“There’s not the kind of deliberative discussion and debate you’d like to see in the highest court in the state,” Winslow said. “There’s no way for the law to evolve.”

Enlarge Source: Texas Watch

The court has overturned jury decisions 74 percent of the time, according to the report, and it interprets the law “broadly or narrowly, as the circumstances warrant, to reach a result that favors the powerful.”

“The court is not giving that proper deference to a jury,” Winslow said.

Bill Peacock, vice president of research at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said he doesn’t think the large percentage of defendant wins means that the Supreme Court favors corporations. He attributed the numbers to the court interpreting laws that the Legislature has passed to limit frivolous lawsuits, which are often brought by consumers against businesses.

“The fact that more corporations are winning before the Supreme Court shows that the Supreme Court is doing its job,” Peacock said.

In a case the Texas Watch report notes as particularly anti-consumer, John Summers sued Entergy. That company owned the power plant he worked for in Bridge City, where he was injured on the job. But Summers didn’t work directly for Entergy; he was hired by a contractor to work at Entergy’s plant. The question before the Supreme Court was whether Summers could sue Entergy even though that company did not hire him.

The court decided that the contractor’s employees were also Entergy’s employees and so Summers’ injuries were covered under Entergy’s worker’s compensation plan. As a result, he could not sue Entergy for negligence in his injuries.

Winslow said that is a “cake and eat it too situation” for employers. Employees of contractors will receive less compensation for their injuries, because they are considered employees of the larger corporation for purposes of workers’ compensation. But the contractors’ employees won’t get the same kind of health insurance and other benefits that corporate employees receive.

Enlarge Source: Texas Watch

Osler McCarthy, the Supreme Court staff attorney for public information, disagreed. He said people often read cases too simply and decide that they have much broader implications than they actually do.

“What I see the court doing is trying to follow the law,” he said. “The statute allowed one company to be general contractor and premises owner.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Scott Brister also said evaluating the Supreme Court isn’t as simple as compiling statistics. The justices, he said, only consider cases in which they might reverse the lower court’s decision.

“They only look at 10 percent of the cases. They’re not going to take a case that looks right, and the consumer won,” Brister said.

Brister denied Texas Watch’s assertion that the court favors corporations.

“We don’t look at a case and say, ‘Where can we help a company?’” he said. “We say, ‘Where does something look wrong?’”

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/texas-courts/texas-supreme-court/texas-watch-claims-supreme-court-favors-businesses/.

Court Watch reviewed the 624 cases involving consumers decided by the Court between 2000 and 2010. The report, “Thumbs on the Scale: A Retrospective of the Texas Supreme Court, 2000-2010,” finds that the state’s high court for civil matters “has marched in lock-step to consistently and overwhelmingly reward corporate defendants and the government at the expense of Texas families.”

“The Texas Supreme Court is an activist, results-oriented body that over the last 10 years has developed into a safe haven for corporate defendants at the expense of individuals, families, and small business owners,” said Alex Winslow, director of Court Watch. “The statistics speak for themselves. The court’s pro-defendant ideology can not be disputed.”

Among the report’s findings are:

• Corporate and government defendants prevail in an average of 74% of cases annually.
Consumers have lost 79% of cases in which they were pitted against a corporate or government defendant.

These findings lead Court Watch to conclude: “The Texas Supreme Court has become a reliable friend to those who seek to escape the consequences of their actions; its justices are the ultimate guardians for the moneyed and powerful who wish to shirk responsibility.”

Despite a constitutional provision limiting its jurisdiction to questions of law – not fact – the Court has routinely overturned decisions made by local juries. Even Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson admonished the Court in a 2004 dissenting opinion, writing: “This Court is constitutionally bound to conduct only a legal – not factual – sufficiency review.”

• Texas Supreme Court has overturned local jury decisions in consumer cases an average of 74% of the time since 2004.

Court Watch writes that “The jury is our smallest, most direct, and least corrupted form of government. … However, the Texas Supreme Court has displayed a fundamental disregard for juries.”

Court Watch has been monitoring and reporting on the Texas Supreme Court and the impact its decisions have on Texas families since 1996. During that time, Court Watch has issued an annual list of the most anti-consumer cases of a given year. In keeping with that tradition, this report includes a “Dirty Dozen of the Decade,” a representative sampling of the most dangerous, far-reaching decisions made by the Texas Supreme Court during the last decade.

Thumbs on the Scale CtWatch Jan2012 Final

Texas Court Watch is a project of the Texas Watch Foundation, a non-partisan 501(c)(3) organization. Content that appears on this page has been produced by the Texas Watch Foundation for research and public education purposes.