The Texas Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Patel v. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (link no longer available), striking down a state law requiring at least 750 hours of training in order to perform commercial “eyebrow threading”—a form of hair removal mainly performed in Sou…
Texas
Obama’s Transgender Edict Enjoined Nationwide by Federal District Court in Texas
In a 38-page decision dated August 21, but released today, Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a nationwide injunction against the Obama administration’s edict — in the form of a “Dear Colleagues” memo — that recipients of federal f…
Red State, Blue Cities
Will the Texas model become a victim of its own success? John Steinbeck once called Texas “a mystique closely approximating a religion”—and today, the Lone Star State remains full of myth, mystery, and paradox. Yet, as Steinbeck also noted, “Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger…
The Jurisprudence of Civil Asset Forfeiture
The seizure by the state of assets connected to crime is a controversial subject. Asset forfeiture’s proponents—mainly law-enforcement agencies—view it as essential to fighting crime (especially the drug trade), because it deprives wrongdoers of the fruits of their illicit activities. Civil…
Good News and Bad News on School Finance in Texas
The long-awaited decision from the Texas Supreme Court in the school finance case, Morath v. Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition, was issued on May 13, 2016. (The case was argued over eight months earlier.) The court’s jargon-laden 100-page (!) decision can be summarized with this sen…
Sticking with Edgewood
On the subject of school finance, the Texas Supreme Court doggedly refuses to overturn an activist precedent from a prior era. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), a lawsuit brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) challenging spending…
Texas Voters Get a Re-Do in Important Judicial Election
No, the governor of Wisconsin is NOT running for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In a recent series of posts (here, here, here, and here), on Bench Memos and elsewhere, I discussed the various candidates running in the March 1 Republican primary for the Texas Supreme Court. In Texas, all jud…
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry Vindicated at Last
Outrageous persecution by politicized Travis County D.A.’s office finally halted by Texas’s highest criminal court. Yesterday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — the highest appellate court in Texas with criminal jurisdiction — dismissed felony charges brought against then-governor Ric…
Higher Education Emulates the National Football League
The “Rooney Rule” is the latest debasement of academia. The controversial halftime show at Super Bowl 50 demonstrated–if any proof was needed–that the NFL is in the entertainment business. The football cartel’s ratings-conscious bean counters carefully assessed television demographics t…
Texas Attorney General To Be Grilled Over Religious Liberty Advice
Critics contend that opinion regarding objections to Obergefell was unethical. Both Ed Whelan (here) and I (here) have previously written about the unfounded backlash to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s advisory opinion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision last …