[ Report Home | Previous Page | Next Page ] TEXAS SUPREME COURT JUSTICE PRISCILLA OWEN I. Owen’s Judicial Career D. Contributor Conflicts

Texas is the largest of nine states in which voters still select Supreme Court justices through expensive, partisan elections. This controversial practice has undermined public confidence in the court’s rulings. More than half of the money that Texas justices raise comes from lawyers or litigants who have brought legal matters before the court.¹²  All of the Texas Supreme Court Justices are mired in these donor conflicts.

Justice Owen raised a total of $1,376,000 for her 1994 and 2000 Supreme Court campaigns. With the help of consultant Karl Rove, Owen raised more than $1 million of this money for a competitive 1994 race against a Democratic opponent.¹³  There is a disturbing correlation between Owen’s donors and the lawyers and litigants who have had legal matters in her court. The 2001 Texans for Public Justice report Pay to Play identified the employer and occupation of donors who gave a total of $926,516 to Owen’s 1994 campaign. Lawyers and litigants who were parties to petitions in Owen’s court between 1994 and 1998 provided 43 percent of this money that she raised.¹⁴  Lawyers and litigants who were parties to 60 percent of the 758 opinions that the court issued between January 1995 and October 2000 gave Owen $510,503 (37 percent of all her Texas Supreme Court money).

The table below shows the top Owen donors who appeared before her court as litigants. These donor parties fared extremely well before the court’s majority, winning 77 percent of the 26 cases that they had there. They did even better, however, before Justice Owen, who occasionally broke from the majority to support a party that has supported her campaigns. As a result, these same big donors prevailed with Owen in 85 percent of these cases.¹⁵
 

Owen's Top Litigant Donors (1995-2001)

Owen's Top Litigant Donors	Donations	Sup. Ct. Cases Involving Owen	Win/Loss Ratio With Majority	Win/Loss Ratio With Owen
*Haynes & Boone	$16,510	1	1:0	1:0
*Hughes & Luce	$14,236	1	1:0	1:0
Reliant Energy	$9,500	4	3:1	3:1
Enron Corp.	$8,600	1	1:0	1:0
H.E. Butt Grocery	$7,500	3	2:1	3:0
Valero Energy	$6,000	2	1:1	1:1
Texas Utilities	$5,950	3	3:0	3:0
Farmers Insurance	$5,722	2	2:0	2:0
Union Pacific	$5,278	4	4:0	4:0
Coastal Corp.	$5,000	3	2:1	2:1
Dow Chemical	$5,000	2	0:2	1:1
TOTAL:	$89,296	26	20:6	22:4

*Besides appearing before the court as counsel, these firms were defendants in legal malpractice suits.

Justice Owen cast a deciding 1995 vote that prevented one of her top donors from being sued for legal malpractice (Peeler v. Hughes & Luce). After pleading guilty to federal tax fraud, a securities worker tried to sue Hughes & Luce (which this plaintiff had retained for $250,000) for failing to tell her that a prosecutor had offered her immunity in exchange for her testimony in a wider probe. After taking $14,236 from Hughes & Luce in her 1994 race, Owen joined the court’s plurality opinion that ruled that convicted criminals cannot bring malpractice lawsuits. Three dissenting justices pointed out that the plaintiff arguably never would have been indicted or convicted if her attorney had told her about the immunity offer.¹⁶

     In another contributor-conflict case, Owen wrote a scathing dissent to a 2000 majority opinion that found a state law unconstitutional because it was written to let a single developer dodge Austin’s water-quality rules (FM Properties Operating Co. v. City of Austin). Owen decried the majority for curtailing the property rights of Freeport McMoRan’s development arm after taking $2,500 from Freeport board members and $45,458 from its lawyers.

 With its PAC and executives giving court members $134,558 since 1993, Enron Corp. was the justices’ biggest source of corporate donations. During this same period the justices received six Enron-related petitions for review. In three of them, Enron’s adversaries sought Supreme Court review and the justices denied review every time.¹⁷  In contrast, the court granted review in two of the three cases in which Enron sought review (66 percent). This is an extraordinary record in a court that accepts just 11 percent of all petitions received. The court then issued opinions favoring Enron in both cases that it heard. Both opinions overturned lower appeals court rulings against Enron and both occurred in 1996, two years after Owen and consultant Karl Rove raised $8,600 from Enron’s PAC and executives.  In the court’s first Enron ruling, Owen wrote a unanimous opinion that prevented Enron from having to pay $224,989 in school taxes (Enron v. Spring Independent School District). Owen did not participate in the second decision, presumably because it involved her old law firm.¹⁸

 Enron’s success in getting its cases accepted by the court was replicated by numerous big-donor lawyers, law firms, and parties. Owen took $361,602 from these docket sources between 1995-1998. Court records show that law firms that donate heavily to Owen and the other justices are much more likely to have the Supreme Court agree to hear their cases on appeal. The 11 percent overall acceptance rate for petitions to the court jumped to 37 percent for the 149 cases filed by law firms that contributed more than $100,000 to the justices’ campaigns. The justices accepted an astonishing 58 percent of the 43 cases filed by the two law firms that gave them more than $250,000. Yet they agreed to hear just six percent of the appeals by lawyers who made no contributions.¹⁹

On the same day as Enron v. Spring Independent School District, the court issued a per curiam tax decision in favor of another big donor to Owen and the other justices.²⁰  HEB Grocery Co. v. Jefferson County allowed a grocery store chain to pay taxes on just one of six stores that it operated in Jefferson County. This decision benefited HEB Chair Charles Butt, who has hosted fundraisers for justices in his home and who was the justices' second-largest individual donor at the time. The Butts family had given the justices $53,098, including $2,000 to Owen.

 Owen dissented from a pro-consumer HEB decision delivered in 1998, when the court’s majority was moderating its opinions following national media coverage of its money scandals as well as the influence of then-Governor Bush’s relatively moderate Supreme Court appointments. In HEB Grocery Co. v. Vinnie Bilotto, an appeals court and a Supreme Court majority both affirmed a trial court judgment that granted $91,000 in actual damages to a customer who was injured in a grocery store fall. Owen joined two dissents in the case that argued that damages questions to the jury should not have been predicated on the degree of negligence attributed to the defendant. In his concurring opinion in the case, Justice Raul Gonzalez said that the dissenters must have a low opinion of jurors if they think that juries do not know that negligence findings affect damage awards in personal injury cases.  HEB Chairman Charles Butt contributed $5,000 more to Owen shortly after she launched her re-election campaign in 1999.

 Many of these conflict concerns also apply to other Texas Supreme Court members. Yet Owen’s record on money-related ethical issues is sometimes even more troubling than that of her colleagues. She is one of two justices with the worst records of taking campaign money from business interests. She also turned a blind eye to the serious ethical lapses of private law firms that paid improper “bonuses” to her court’s law clerks (see page 7).

Owen's Top Business Group Donors

Organization	Contributions
TX Society of Certified Public Accountants	$20,000
TX Medical Association	$13,261
TX Assn of Business & Chambers of Commerce	$9,500
TX Apartment Association	$7,500
TX Civil Justice League	$6,900
TX Association of Insurance Agents	$6,572
TX Association of Defense Counsel	$5,500
TX Bankers Association	$5,362
Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC	$5,000
TX Association of Realtors	$5,000
TX Dental Association	$5,000

Public records reveal that, among Texas’ Justices, Owen took the second-highest amount and share of campaign money from non-law firm businesses. During her 1994 campaign Owen took $231,379 from non-law firm businesses and trade associations, accounting for 21 percent of her total campaign funds. Only one other justice--current White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales--took a greater share of his campaign money from business interests.²¹  As discussed on page 2, Owen ruled in favor of her top business donors in 22 of the 26 cases they argued before her.
 
 

Owen's Top Law Firm Donors

Law Firm	Donations	Supreme Court Cases (1995-2001)
Vinson & Elkins	$31,550	22
*Andrews & Kurth	$29,374	6
Fulbright & Jaworski	$21,108	33
Baker & Botts	$20,450	35
Haynes & Boone	$16,510	23
Hughes & Luce	$14,236	10
Strasburger & Price	$11,100	21
McDade Fogler Maines	$11,000	3
McGinnis Lochridge & Kilgore	$10,000	6
Susman Godfrey	$10,000	6
TOTAL:	$175,328	165

*Owen did not sit for these cases involving her ex-firm.

During another recent Texas Supreme Court money scandal, moreover, Justice Owen appeared utterly blind to serious concerns about impropriety and unethical behavior at the court. Texas Lawyer reported in 2000 that some of the state’s top law firms were paying pre-employment subsidies of up to $45,000 to Texas Supreme Court law clerks who had been hired to work at the firms after their clerkships ended. These bonuses--paid before or during the clerkships--violated the plain language of the “Bribery and Corrupt Influence” section of the state penal code, which bars judicial employees from accepting “any benefit” from interests with matters before the court. Justice Owen publicly dismissed the scandal as “a political issue that is being dressed up as a good-government issue.”²²  Yet the Texas Legislature, the Texas Ethics Commission and the Office of the Travis County Attorney all indicated that the subsidies violate Texas ethics laws, and the Supreme Court recently was forced to eliminate these private subsidies.