Consumer group takes Texas Supreme Court to task

By CLAY ROBISON

September 20, 2000 Web posted at: 11:29 AM EDT (1529 GMT)

AUSTIN, Texas (The Houston Chronicle) -- The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday received its annual "thumbs down" award from a Texas consumers organization, which said the high court continues to favor corporate interests over people.

The court continues to send a "clear message" to insurance companies, commercial property owners and manufacturers that they have a "dear old friend," said Dan Lambe, executive director of Texas Watch.

"The big losers at the court this last year were crime victims, people with insurance claims, potential class action (plaintiffs) and working Texas families," he added.

Lambe said the consumer advocacy group reviewed all 117 cases in which the court issued opinions from August 1999 through August 2000. The study didn't include the hundreds of cases in which the high court upheld lower court decisions.

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Lambe said that in 56 cases pitting consumers, patients and crime victims against corporate, professional and governmental defendants, the defendants won 57 percent of the time.

Consumers won 32 percent of the time, and the remainder of the decisions were split, according to the study.

The corporate and government win rate was only slightly lower than the 60 percent recorded by Texas Watch for the 1998-99 court term. According to earlier studies by the group, business defendants won 71 percent of the cases in 1997-98 and 69 percent in 1996-97.

Lambe said that the newer members of the high court, including appointees of Gov. George W. Bush, may be having a "moderating" influence. But he said the nine-member panel still has a long way to go in the eyes of consumers.

The Texas Supreme Court has been a philosophical and partisan battleground since the early 1980s, when plaintiffs' lawyers used large campaign contributions to win a series of favorable rulings from a then-Democratic court.

Businesses, insurance companies and doctors soon swung the pendulum back, with large campaign contributions of their own to judicial candidates. And for several years now, the court, all of whose current members are Republicans, has been criticized by consumer groups.

Osler McCarthy, staff attorney for public information for the Texas Supreme Court, said the "logical conclusion" of the Texas Watch study indicates the court "is a moderate court that decides cases based on the law and not an agenda."

"Roughly half the cases were decided for the `good guys' and roughly half for the `bad guys.' The law doesn't allow this court to decide at the beginning who are the `good guys' and who are the `bad guys,' " he said.

Lambe said some of the court's most "harmful" decisions for consumers during the past year weakened safety standards for manufacturers of products that fall into the hands of children, weakened incentives for owners of commercial property to provide safe work sites for employees and made it more difficult for small claimants to file class-action suits.

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