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

Juries have lost considerable authority under the Texas Supreme Court in general and Justice Owen in particular.¹⁰  Since the conservative takeover of the court a decade ago, “Jury verdicts became highly suspect and were frequently overturned for a variety of ever-expanding reasons,” wrote 4th District Court of Appeals Justice Phil Hardberger in his law journal article.¹¹  “Legal tools of ‘no duty,’ ‘no proximate cause,’ ‘no evidence,’ ‘insufficient evidence,’ ‘unreliable experts,’ ‘unqualified experts,’ and ‘junk science,’ wiped out many jury verdicts. Damages, too, did not go unnoticed. Juries’ assessments were wiped out by increasingly harsher standards for mental anguish and punitive damages. Summary judgments took on a new life. Statutes of limitations, particularly in medical cases, were interpreted much more narrowly, adding to the number of summary judgments.”  Owen has consistently been one of the court’s most anti-jury members and has often dissented from  the majority to put forth extreme anti-jury opinions.

An anti-jury opinion that Owen counts among one of “ten significant opinions that I have written” is her majority opinion in Merrell Dow Pharm. v. Havner. The Havner family alleged that the morning sickness drug Bendectin caused severe birth defects in their daughter, Kelly. Owen’s opinion used extremely strict limits on the admissibility of expert testimony to overturn a jury award (after trial court modification) of $3.75 million in actual damages and $15 million in punitive damages.

Owen also hammered juries in her majority opinion in State Farm Life Ins. Co. v. Beaston. Terri Beaston sued an insurer that denied a life insurance claim after her husband died in a car crash. The trial court judgment granted Beaston the $250,000 value of her husband’s policy but overruled a jury award of $200,000 in mental anguish damages on the grounds that there was no finding that the defendants acted knowingly. A court of appeals reinstated the mental anguish award and trebled it under a state Insurance Code provision. Owen’s majority opinion overturned the jury and two lower courts to rule that Beaston take nothing. This opinion created new obstacles for consumers who are deceived by insurers.

In her dissent in Universe Life Insurance Co. v. Giles, Owen shows herself to be more extreme than the majority in undermining the authority of Texas juries. In this bad-faith insurance case, the majority overturned the jury’s punitive damages award citing a lack of evidence. Owen joined a more extreme dissent that would have directed judges to replace juries in making bad-faith determinations. The majority criticized this dissent, saying it “would take the resolution of bad-faith disputes away from the juries that have been deciding bad faith cases for more than a decade.”