Researching Texas Law

Chapter 7 of Researching Texas Law (133-34) provides a brief summary of how to locate municipal codes in several Texas cities.  The best sites for locating these codes are below:

Municode, Online Library

Municode is by far the most thorough source for municipal codes. It contains the full text of codes for dozens of Texas cities, large and small.  Most of these codes appear to be up-to-date.

American Legal Publishing: Texas

American Legal Publishing also provides the full text of several codes, though this list is not as thorough as Municode. Most of the codes are from cities in north Texas.

Chapter 7 also refers to the LexisNexis Municipal Codes Web Library, but this only contains the code from one Texas city (El Paso).

Chapter 3 of Researching Texas Law includes URLs for many of the sources for Texas rules of court. Many of these rules are easy to locate. Here are two links that provide access to most of the rules:

Supreme Court of Texas

The site of the Supreme Court of Texas provides access to most of the rules of general applicability. Below are links to the specific types of rules.

1. Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure
   
2. Texas Rules of Civil Procedure
3. Texas Rules of Evidence
4. Texas Discovery Rules
5. Code of Judicial Conduct | Proposed Revisions
6. Court Reporters Rules
7. Texas Rules of Judicial Administration | Proposed Amendments [pdf]
8. Other Rules Governing Attorneys
9. Parental Notification Rules and Forms
10. Texas Court Rules: History and Process

Texas Local Rules

The most comprehensive source for local rules is a softbound annual publication entitled Local Rules of the District Courts in Texas. This book is not duplicated online. The best collection of links for local rules in Texas is Texas Local Rules. The site includes links to rules from about 48 counties.

This is an entirely self-serving post, to be sure, but there have been a number of articles and blog posts recently stressing the need for students to improve their skills so that they can stand out among others in the job market.

Consider these:

Want a Job Offer This Summer? Start Working Now, Law Students are Told (ABA Journal)

Five Key Suggestions to Help Summer Associates Get Offers from Their Firms in a Difficult Economy (Findlaw)

Both pieces (especially the latter) stress that research and writing skills are so vital that law students should spend the spring term improving their skills so that they can hit the ground running when they serve as summer associates.

According to the author of the Findlaw piece:

It’s obviously important, too, not to make any glaring research mistakes when you turn in work. If you miss one major case in one memo, that’s a serious problem. But avoiding errors is easier said than done. What are the best methods to make sure you don’t do so – beyond asking associates and peers to look over your work, as I recommended above?

During this Spring semester, I would advise taking advantage of the expertise of the computer research company representatives who visit your campus, to ensure that you are completely fluent when it comes to legal research. Then, when you become a summer associate, remember to use multiple different searches and sources for your research.

The same author on legal writing:

Just by reading a memo’s first paragraph, a partner or associate will instantly sense whether it is well-written or not. . . [M]ake sure to remember that a law firm memo – unlike, say, a law review article – needs to reach definite conclusions as to what the best interpretation of the law is and how the firm or client should proceed forward. Equivocation will leave the partner – and the client – better-informed, but still without any clear guidance. Every memo needs to have a bottom-line conclusion or recommendation.

Also, if you feel that writing is a weakness for you, make sure to follow three simple rules: (1) Put facts in chronological order. (2) Use section headings to make organization clear. (3) Use shorter sentences whenever you can, because they are clearer and faster to read.

A legal memo is supposed to provide clarity, so a confusing memo misses the point. The area of law might be confusing, but the memo still has to be clear. If the particular area of law is truly a mess, then isolate a few clear alternative viewpoints in the morass. Don’t be afraid to make predictions about how future courts might rule as long as you back them up, appropriately qualify them, and also describe the alternatives.

* * *

More news from the legal research front, which is rare– here is a story about a company that was fined an additional $80,000 because the company’s lawyer failed to adequately research whether one of the company’s pregnant workers was covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act.

* * *

And more about the importance of proofreading, with this one focusing on resumes and applications. The vice president and deputy general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel says that she will weed out applications with typos. “If an applicant can’t get it right now, then I assume his or her work will be equally unreliable,” she says.

Rule 18.4 of the Greenbook (11th ed. 2006) uses the following as an example for citing to a form book:

4 Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms § 74:4 (Lawyers Coop. Publ’g ed., 2d ed. 1993).

To say the least, this citation form is fraught with problems, including:

(1) The title page of the books says Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms Second Edition, and the book’s preface says the same thing. However, the book’s cover says Texas Forms: Pleading and Practice, Second Edition, which is consistent with a similar title by the same publisher—Texas Forms: Legal and Business. This is one instance were a “Cite this authority” section might be helpful, but there is no such section.

Rule 15.3 of the Bluebook indicates to use the “full main title as it appears on the title page,” and one can probably assume this means the title page inside the front cover. Here’s the problem, though: How many library users would think to check the inside cover of a book to make sure that the book with a cover title of Texas Forms: Pleading and Practice is actually Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms Second Edition?

From experience, I can tell you not many.

(2) Thomson Corporation purchased Lawyers Cooperative Publishing in 1989, and Thomson integrated Lawyers Cooperative Publishing into Thomson Legal Publishing in 1995. The following year, Thomson purchased West Publishing Co., and since that time, Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms Second Edition, also possibly known as Texas Forms: Pleading and Practice, Second Edition, has been published under the West name (West Group, Thomson/West, and so forth).

Accordingly, the editor’s name used in rule 18.4 is wrong for those citing to the current edition.

(3) Even with the proper publisher included– Thomson/West– nowhere does the source list the publisher as the editor. The volumes generally list individuals who serve as authors and editors in the introductory matter, so it would make more sense to refer to those individuals (if anyone) under Bluebook Rule 15.2 than it would to refer to the publisher as the editor.

The only other example in Chapter 18 of the Greenbook that refers to a publisher as an editor is the first example in Rule 18.4. The citation:

Beth Steele, Texas Forms § 11:76 (Bancroft-Whitney ed., Supp. 1995).

Bancroft-Whitney is yet another publisher that was purchased by Thomson during the 1990s, and it turns out that the successor to the book cited on the bottom of page 87 is Texas Forms: Legal and Business, which now looks nearly identical to Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms Second Edition, also possibly known as Texas Forms: Pleading and Practice, Second Edition. This is referred to as clarity.

Anyway, the final problem here is: why would anyone cite to a form book in the first place? No reported Texas case has ever cited to either Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms Second Edition or Texas Forms: Pleading and Practice, Second Edition. There is one citation in a Texas law review to this source in a student comment. The student (or law review staff, whatever the case may be), cited the source as:

5 Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms § 90:15 (2d ed. 2004)

For brievity sake, I won’t include the full cite, but the citation to the article is at 39 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 423, 450 n.299.

Epilogue

I think the Texas Tech citation version is better, though I still don’t understand Thomson/West’s practice of renaming the title page but not the actual book. The publisher sells the book online under the name Texas Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice.  However, the database description for the same book in electronic form is Texas Forms Pleading and Practice. It’s just strange.

The Texas Legislature convened for its first day on Tuesday, January 13.

Here are the key dates in 2009 related to this legislative session.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 (1st day)
81st Legislature convenes at noon

Tex. Gov’t Code Ann. § 301.001 (Vernon 2005).

Friday, March 13, 2009 (60th day)
Deadline for filing bills and joint resolutions other than local bills, emergency appropriations, and bills that have been declared an emergency by the governor.

[House Rule 8, Sec. 8; Senate Rule 7.07(b)]

Monday, June 1, 2009 (140th day)

Last day of 81st Regular Session; corrections only in house and senate.

Tex. Const. art. III, § 24(b).

Session Ends

Sunday, June 21, 2009 (20th day following final adjournment)
Last day the governor can sign or veto bills passed during the regular legislative session.

Tex. Const. art. IV, § 14.

Monday, August 31, 2009 (91st day following final adjournment)
Date that bills without specific effective dates (that could not be effective immediately) become law

Tex. Const. art. III, § 39.

Here are some helpful links related to the current legislative session:

Calendar

Meetings

House Research Organization: Topics for the 81st Legislature

In Chapter 9 of Researching Texas Law (pp. 194-95), we discuss briefly the TAC Titles Affected Inquiry System. This tool has been removed from the Secretary of State’s website, and the web address that we provide on page 194 is no longer functional.

To update the Texas Administrative Code online, follow the steps below:

Assume for purposes of this example that a researcher has found a citation to 1 Tex. Admin. Code § 175.3 (2008). To update this section online, the best place to go is the TAC Viewer on the Secretary of State’s website. The rule includes a source note, which appears at the end of the rule. For § 175.3, the source note reads as follows:

Source Note: The provisions of this §175.3 adopted to be effective December 19, 2007, 32 TexReg 9323; amended to be effective December 8, 2008, 33 TexReg 9971

From this note, the reader would know that the section was amended on December 8 and that this amendment appears on page 9971 of volume 33 of the Texas Register.

On pages 126-127 of Researching Texas Law, we discuss the revised Texas statutes that were approved by the Texas Legislature in 1879, 1895, 1911, and 1925.  The revised civil statutes are available in a variety of old print resources and are now available through the website of the Texas State Law Library.

Here are the links to the four revisions of Texas statutes:

Revised Statutes of Texas, 1879

Revised Statutes of Texas, 1895

Revised Statutes of Texas, 1911

Revised Statutes of Texas, 1925

To locate the original text of session laws during the nineteenth century, the best resource is H.P.N. Gammel’s The Laws of Texas, 1822-1897. Gammel’s work is also available online through a website compiled at the University of North Texas.

In Texas, researchers are often required to consult session laws not only for historical purposes but also for citation purposes.This usually occurs when a researcher wants to cite to an older Texas statute on point. For many years, Texas statutes were organized as articles in the Texas Revised Civil Statutes and published as part of Vernon’s Annotated Revised Civil Statutes of the State of Texas. When these statutes have been placed into subject-matter codes, such as the Education Code, the old articles were repealed when the new codes were enacted. This means that many Texas statutes that have never been “taken off the books” technically have been repealed during this process.

The Greenbook does not allow citations to Vernon’s Annotated Revised Civil Statutes of the State of Texas under Rule 11.1.1(a). The proper citation instead must be to the official session laws, meaning the citation typically should be to the General and Special Laws of the State of Texas. This rule is somewhat inconsistent with Rule 12.2.1 of the Bluebook, which provides that citations to statutes no longer in force should be to a previous edition of a code where the statute last appeared. The Greenbook governs in this instance, so we get to deal with the headache of citing to the session law.

Citing to the original session law is not a big problem if a researcher has access to the General and Special Laws, but few smaller libraries have a full collection. Moreover, libraries that have lost certain volumes of the General and Special Laws have a difficult or impossible trying to replace those volumes. In our library’s case, we lost the volume that contained the session laws for the 63d Legislature in 1973. This volume contains the original enacted version of the modern Texas Penal Code as well as one of the codifications of the Texas Family Code. Our efforts to replace the volume have failed, and we really cannot say what we think about the person who misplaced the volume.

If a researcher needs to locate an older session law but does not have access to the General and Special Laws, there are a couple of options. These include the following:

1. Microfiche: State Session Laws (William S. Hein & Co., Inc.)

The most comprehensive alternative for Texas session laws is a microfiche set available through William S. Hein & Co., Inc. This set provides the full text of session laws dating back to the pre-statehood days of 1824.

2. Westlaw: 1987 to Present

Historical Texas session laws dating back to 1987 are available on Westlaw through the TX-LEGIS-OLD database.

3. Lexis: 1987 to present

Like Westlaw, Lexis has Texas session laws available from 1987 to the present. These are available in the TEX Library, TXALS File.

4. HeinOnline

The subscription database HeinOnline has made Texas session laws dating back to 2001 available in PDF form. This is a convenient source for recent laws, but it would be nice (not-so-subtle hint) if these session laws were available going much further back. As in, 1824 or so.

Maybe someday?

[Update, 10/8/08: Thanks to a comment from Shane Marmion at HeinOnline, we now know that the session laws dating back to 1824 will be added sometime in 2009. This is great news.]

This post supplements information found in Chapter 8 of Researching Texas Law.

Electronic availability of many types of legislative materials in Texas has generally been limited to documents produced from 1995 onward. The most easily accessible location for documents produced since the 74th Legislature convened in 1995 is Texas Legislature Online. From this website, a researcher can locate bill files, which include various versions of bills, bill analyses, and fiscal notes. Researchers can also review the history of bills introduced since the 71st Legislature in 1989.

For bills introduced between 1973 and 1993, however, researchers generally have had to access microfiche sources or, more commonly, contact a librarian at the Legislative Reference Library for assistance in retrieving these documents. The LRL provides a useful guide about how to locate Texas legislative history materials, and we frequently direct students and others to this guide for direction.

Some good news for Texas researchers is that the LRL has expanded the availability of some bill analyses. According to information on this page, a research can retrieve electronic copies of bill analyses from the following sources:

House Study Group: 64th (1975) – 69th (1985)
House Research Organization (HRO): 70th (1987) – 80th (2007)
Office of House Bill Analysis: 76th (1999) & 77th (2001)

Senate Research Center (SRC): 70th (1987) – 80th (2007)

The House Study Group bill analyses were the predecessors to those now produced by the House Research Organization. These are often more detailed than bill analyses produced by House committees and also include summaries of what supporters and opponents of the relevant bills have said during deliberations. Click here for a representative sample of a two-page bill analysis for H.B. 113, introduced during the 67th Legislature in 1981. The bill provided for the establishment of a career education program, and the analysis provides summaries of both the pros (i.e., arguments that the program would provide adequate preparation of students for the work force) and the cons (i.e., arguments that the federal government would eventually withdraw money, leaving the state to fund the program).

While it will still be necessary to consult the Legislative Reference Library for complete legislative histories prior to 1995, the new database will be helpful in a number of research projects.

The tutorial below focuses on how to locate and to cite to an opinion issued by the Texas Attorney General.

The Attorney General’s website has more information about these opinions and how to locate them.

Chapter 10 of Researching Texas Law also cover the subject of how to research Texas Attorneys General opinions.