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Combining two databases covering 1994 through 1998, this study finds that Texas Supreme Court justices are much more likely to accept appeals filed by their campaign contributors than appeals filed by non-contributors.

The databases combined to produce this report are:

• Campaign contributions data that justices file with the Texas Ethics Commission; and
• Docket data covering “petitions for review”⁴ filed with the Supreme Court.

Petitions data
From 1994 through 1998, Texas Supreme Court justices exercised their discretion to either grant or deny 4,237 petitions for review filed by petitioners who sought to appeal the actions of lower state courts.⁵  Usually just one side of a dispute petitioned the Supreme Court for relief, though both sides sometimes filed petitions—albeit for different reasons. For the sake of simplicity, this study just examines the 3,942 “single-sided petitions” in which just one side of a dispute petitioned the high court to review their case. Excluding the relatively few cases in which both sides filed petitions left researchers with a simplified body of appeals. In the petitions analyzed here, just one side of a dispute asked the Supreme Court to take its case, a request that the justices then either granted or denied (the next section explains the petition process).

Contributions data
The campaign contribution data in this report cover the election cycles of the 10 Supreme Court justices who faced an election from 1994 through 1998 (see table). Researchers married the contributions and petitions databases to identify those lawyers and litigants who filed Supreme Court petitions and who also contributed to the justices’ political campaigns.

The legal counsel contributions data include direct contributions from the attorney, the attorney’s law firm (or its political action committee) and other attorneys employed by that firm. Contributions data on litigating parties only cover contributions made by institutional entities (e.g. Exxon or El Paso Electric Co.). The data for these institutional parties include the contributions of the entity (or its PAC) and the entity’s employees (usually its top executives). This report excludes the contributions of individual parties (e.g. Jane Doe) because court records rarely identify the home town of these individuals, making it exceedingly difficult to accurately match individual parties with campaign contributors of the same name.

In all, this study screened the contributions of 1,766 petitioning parties and 5,060 petitioning attorneys affiliated with 1,717 law firms.