Payola Justice: How Texas Supreme Court Justices Raise Money from Court Litigants

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Texas is one of just nine states where voters elect justices through partisan races⁹. Texas' nine Supreme Court justices serve staggered, six-year terms¹⁰. When a Texas justice fails to complete a term, the governor appoints a temporary replacement, without any confirmation oversight by the Texas Senate.

When researchers began this study in early October 1997, they examined Texas Ethics Commission campaign contribution reports covering the most recent election of the nine justices then sitting on the court. These justices included two Democrats (Justices Raul Gonzalez and Rose Spector) and seven Republicans (Chief Justice Thomas Phillips and Justices Nathan Hecht, John Cornyn, Craig Enoch, Priscilla Owen, James Baker and Greg Abbott). The two oldest of these contribution reports, those covering the 1992 elections of Justices Enoch and Spector, were discarded from the report for several reasons. First, as was the custom in 1992, these justices' contribution reports included negligible information on their contributors' employers. This omission makes it exceedingly difficult to match up the names of their contributors—and their contributors' employers—with parties on the court docket¹¹.

Another reason for discarding the oldest data is that the court's composition was much different in 1992; three current members of the court (Justices Owen, Baker and Abbott) had yet to launch Supreme Court campaigns. To the extent possible, researchers wanted to focus on the track records of the current members of the court. While both Justices Spector and Enoch (who are not studied in this report) are up for reelection this year, reports on their 1997 funding were not filed with the Ethics Commission until January 15, 1998; their 1998 filings have yet to be filed.

For these reasons, researchers limited this study to seven justices—Chief Justice Phillips, along with Justices Hecht, Cornyn, Owen, Baker, Abbott and Gonzalez. Researchers gathered Ethics Commission reports for each of these justices for the 18-month period corresponding to their most recent election (the earliest of which occurred in November 1994). Some 18,000 contributions of $100 or more were entered into a database. As this task was being completed in October 1997, Justice Cornyn resigned to run for Texas Attorney General. Cornyn was kept in the study, however, since he sat on the court throughout the period studied here.

Although the contributions data studied in this report are more complete than those found in older filings, incomplete employer data is still filed for some contributors. Since lawyers and law firms give more money to Supreme Court campaigns than any other profession, researchers cross-listed contributor names that lacked employer information with attorney directories to identify the profession and employer of these donors. Nonetheless, a shortcoming of this report—and a greater shortcoming of the contribution reports filed by court candidates—is that, of the $9,166,450 contributed to the seven justices in the period studied, $748,219 (8 percent) came from individuals for whom no employer information was readily available. As such, this study almost certainly underreports links between the court docket and the justices' contributors.

Researchers next entered data on the 530 opinions that the court issued from January 1994 (the year of the most recent elections of Justices Gonzalez, Hecht and Owen) to October 30, 1997 (when this section of this report was prepared) into a docket database. Finally, the names of the litigant parties in these cases, along with their lawyers and law firms, were cross-listed with the names and employers of contributors who gave the seven justices $100 or more during the study period. The uncovered links between the court docket and the justices' campaign contributors is the focus of this report.

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