Carl Cecere recaps the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Barber v. Thomas, No. 09-5201, for SCOTUSblog. In Barber, the Court rejected a challenge by federal prisoners to the method used by the Bureau of Prisons to calculate “good time” sentence reductions. But in doing so, as Carl relates, the Court lamented that Congress had been far too cryptic in the statutory guidance it provided for these calculations.

Carl Cecere recaps the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Lewis v. City of Chicago, No. 08-974, for SCOTUSblog. In Lewis, the Court expanded the range of circumstances in which disparate impact lawsuits can be raised by ruling in favor of firefighters who challenged the City of Chicago’s use of the results of a performance exam to determine who would get one of the city’s coveted firefighter positions. Carl relates how the petitioners bucked conventional logic on the Court’s attitude toward disparate impact claims and were rewarded with a unanimous victory by the Court.

Rick Thompson’s article examined the expanding role of mandamus practice in Texas.  Although mandamus relief is intended to be an “extraordinary remedy,” few Texas courts limit mandamus relief to truly extraordinary cases because the Texas Supreme Court has dramatically expanded the mandamus standard of review since 2004.  Indeed, in recent years, twenty to twenty-five percent of all opinions issued by the Texas Supreme Court are mandamus opinions.

Carl Cecere represented on appeal a member of a same-sex couple married in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal, who sought a divorce in Texas, where it is not.  Here Carl debates Hiram Sassar of the Liberty Institute.  Carl argues that Texas law does not prohibit same-sex couples from obtaining divorces, even though it would prohibit the State from allowing same-sex marriages. If Texas refused to allow a same-sex couple to obtain a divorce, Carl argues that Texas would be violating numerous constitutional rights of married same-sex couples, including equal protection, due process, and the right to travel.

In his article, Rick Thompson identifies the types of orders subject to interlocutory review and sets out the procedures for perfecting the appeal in the courts of appeals and the Texas Supreme Court. The article also discusses the permissive appeal statute and outlines the procedures for perfecting this type of agreed interlocutory appeal.

On Wednesday, September 8, 2009, Hankinson Levinger’s Ryan Clinton delivered a presentation on crafting petitions for review at the State Bar Advanced Civil Appellate Course in Austin, Texas.  Clinton has been successful in convincing the Texas Supreme Court to grant review of more than half a dozen cases, and he shared his insights into the petition-for-review process with the attending appellate practitioners.

After discussing the common standards of review employed by appellate courts in Texas, Thompson discusses the rapid extension of the clear-and-convincing evidence standard of review as well as the consequences of the Texas Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision in City of Keller v. Wilson.  The Appendix to the article lists eighty different types of trial court rulings, the appellate standard and scope of review applicable to each ruling, and the cases and statutes that discuss these standards and scopes of review for each ruling.

In a comprehensive article entitled “Pondering Punitives:  Issues Arising at Trial and on Appeal,” co-author Brett Kutnick examines the variety of statutory, common law, and constitutional issues that arise in obtaining or defeating, upholding or overturning punitive damage awards in Texas.

This article analyzes the struggle faced by courts and commentators to clarify the boundary between contract claims and tort claims.  Although the line between a cause of action for contract and one sounding in tort is often blurred, an examination of Texas case law reveals some guiding principles when making the determination of whether a cause of action that includes breach of contract will also support tort and punitive damages.