[ Report Home | Previous Page | Next Page ] Pay to Play V. Paying To Play D-2. Petitioning Parties Gave $1.3 Million

Although lawyers and law firms dominated petitioner contributions, the Supreme Court’s institutional parties contributed $1.3 million, or 19 percent of all the petitioner money tracked here. These 1,766 institutional petitioners (including such powerhouses as Southwestern Bell, Nationsbank and Coastal Corp.) had an average petition-acceptance rate of 20 percent. For parties that contributed more than $10,000, this acceptance rate jumped to 33 percent.
 
 
 

The significance of the data for parties that contributed more than $100,000 is limited by the fact that there were only three such parties and they filed just one Supreme Court petition apiece (see table). The two highest-volume petitioning parties—HEB (contributing $72,398) and Southwestern Bell (contributing $27,350)—filed a total of 12 petitions, with the justices agreeing to accept 33 percent of these appeals. The justices also receive large amounts of business money through trade associations, which are not included in this analysis (see Checks & Imbalances, Texans for Public Justice, April 2000).
 

Data Note: In this section—and in the next one on petitioning parties—the analysis shifts from the 3,942 individual petitions studied in this report to each filing made by every petitioner. There are many more petitioner filings than petitions because a single petition can involve multiple attorneys, law firms and parties.