[ Report Home | Previous Page | Next Page ] TEXAS SUPREME COURT JUSTICE PRISCILLA OWEN I. Owen’s Judicial Career B. Anti-Consumer Opinions

The business interests that financed the conservative takeover of the court got a splendid return on their investment--at the expense of consumers. Studying 625 opinions issued between 1995 and April 1999, Court Watch found that “physicians, hospitals and other medical entities won 86 percent of their cases against other types of appellate parties.”⁹  The report added that, “Insurance companies and manufacturers each won more than 70 percent of their appeals, and businesses triumphed in two-thirds of their appeals. Individuals, on the other hand, won only 36 percent of the time in cases against other types of litigants.”  Owen helped lead the court in its anti-consumer decisions.  Even as a majority of the court moderated its opinions, however, Owen has been on the far right of a conservative court on these issues.

In Provident American Ins. v. Castaneda, Denise Castaneda sued her insurer for not covering her medical costs after she had her spleen and gallbladder removed due to a hereditary blood disease. A jury awarded her $50,000 in damages, which the trial court trebled under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. But Owen’s majority opinion overturned two lower courts, finding insufficient evidence of liability and creating a new defense for insurers to deny claims on pre-existing conditions. Owen is especially proud of the activist, anti-consumer majority opinion she wrote in In re City of Georgetown, listing it as one of “ten significant opinions that I have written.” In this opinion, Owen rewrote the Texas Public Information Act to block the media from seeing an engineering report that a city commissioned in response to a lawsuit over sewage discharges. To reach this result, Owen had to overrule the trial court and the state Attorney General and plowed under statutory language that said that the courts could not bar from disclosure any information that is not expressly made confidential by the statute.

Owen’s unyielding support for business interests has often isolated her from the less extreme, yet generally pro-business majority. In a test of the constitutionality of a state law tailored to exempt a specific land developer from the City of Austin’s water quality rules, Owen wrote a forceful dissent that decried the majority for finding this special-interest statute unconstitutional (FM Properties Operating Co. v. City of Austin). The dissenting Owen, who received $2,500 in campaign contributions from the same developer and $45,000 from the developer’s attorneys, criticized the majority for curtailing the developer’s private property rights. The majority opinion retorted that, “most of Justice Owen’s dissent is nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric and thus merits no response.”