Three of the nine seats on the Texas Supreme Court are up for election this year, and all three have Republican incumbents facing competent Democratic challengers. Most voters probably have little idea about just who the court's justices are, and that's not only because of the usual obscurity of the court. It's also because these nine, all Republicans, think pretty much alike. It's time for a change.
The principal criticism of the court, which handles only civil cases, has been its uniformity in ruling for business in cases where it is pitted against consumers or workers.
By one measure, a study by University of Texas law professor David Anderson of the court's 2004 and 2005 tort cases in which the court issued an opinion, the defendant - usually a business - won 87 percent of the time. While the court should not be expected to rule 50-50 in such cases, 87 percent suggests that justice isn't blind at the Texas Supreme Court.
A good example of the court's tilt toward business was its 9-0 ruling in the Entergy case, which for the first time protected plant owners from negligence lawsuits when contracts workers were injured on the job. To reach that ruling the court had to ignore years of settled practice on that very point in Texas, as well as legislative intent. Facing a storm of criticism, the court has agreed to reconsider the ruling.
In another case, the court ruled 6-3 in a case that a Colleyville church could not be held liable for harm to a young woman held down for two hours against her will to free her of a demon. Constitutional protection for religious liberty, the majority said, protected the church.
There have been other embarrassments as well, with questions raised about some justices using their political accounts for personal travel expenses, one justice and his wife caught up in a suspicious fire that destroyed their home and yet another who tried to get the Legislature to pay his legal bills for defending himself in an ethics case...
Place 7 - Texans are so used to candidates of dubious qualification but well-known name running for public office that they might automatically dismiss someone named Sam Houston, 45, a Democrat who is challenging the Republican incumbent for this seat, Dale Wainwright, 47.
But voters should take this Houston - no relation to the original - seriously enough to vote for him. From Houston, Houston is a trial lawyer with broad litigation experience and a critic of the Supreme Court, which he says needs more balance.
Wainwright has a terrific résumé and is personally impressive, but his output has been light compared to the other justices.
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Place 8 - Linda Yañez, 60, a Democrat on the state's 13th Court of Appeals, based in Corpus Christi, is challenging the incumbent, Phil Johnson, 63, a former chief justice of the 7th Court of Appeals at Amarillo.
Yañez, too, says the court needs to go more to the middle, and her up-from-the-bootstraps personal story would bring a useful perspective to a court dominated by the products of big law firms.
Here's a running tally of Texas Supreme Court newspaper endorsements for Sam Houston and Linda Yanez so far:
