[ Report Home | Previous Page | Next Page ] Pay to Play II. Introduction

Every year, hundreds of litigants who are unsatisfied with their treatment by lower state courts file “petitions for review” that urge the Texas Supreme Court to intervene on their behalf.¹  Acting in secrecy, the justices agree to accept a small fraction of these requests. Usually just one side (“the petitioner”) seeks Supreme Court review to reverse a lower court action that benefited an opponent (“the respondent”). In these instances, the court rules either for or against litigants at the most basic level, determining who will get their day in the high court—and who will not. This report analyzes the extent to which the justices swing the courtroom doors open wider when big campaign contributors come knocking. It finds that petitioners who donate to the justices enjoy extraordinary access to the high court.

Texas is one of eight remaining states where Supreme Court candidates run for office in expensive, partisan campaigns that owe much of their funding to the lawyers and litigants who have business before these courts. These judicial elections are then decided by an electorate that—for the most part—knows little about the justices it elects.

Texans for Public Justice previously documented the inherent conflicts of interest of this system,²  which has been exposed in such national investigative programs as Frontline and 60 Minutes. Such coverage has trained a spotlight on Texas’ system of judicial selection, particularly the degree to which its top judges take campaign funds from lawyers and litigants with business in their courtrooms.

The legal establishment has danced around this legitimacy crisis with a Texas two step. It acknowledges that Texas’ judicial-selection system is fatally flawed. “The way Texas elects partisan judges, and allows those who practice before them to supply the campaign money will always fuel suspicion that justice is for sale here,” Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips has said. At the same time, the legal establishment insists that this is a mere perception problem. Those who give and take the millions of campaign dollars say that this money has no influence on the official actions of Texas judges. They cling to this claim despite a 1999 Supreme Court survey that found that 48 percent of the state’s judges say that campaign contributions have “a significant influence on the outcome of  judicial decisions.”

The contention that money does not influence judicial actions stumbles over an awkward coincidence. When plaintiff lawyers bankrolled Texas Supreme Court justices in the 1980s, the court’s decisions often favored plaintiff interests. Similarly, as documented by watchdogs, the media and even a prominent state appellate judge,³ the court’s decisions have overwhelmingly favored corporate defendants and defense lawyers since the 1990s, when these interests began bankrolling justices’ campaigns. This study goes a step further by using the court’s own contributions and docket data to document that the justices are far more likely to accept appeals filed by their top campaign contributors.