This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication
of the Texas Subsequent History Table will
be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market
interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition)
history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table.
The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to
determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an
appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation
to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on
the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion. For example, practitioners may prefer to use
as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both
in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that
simply presents no error that requires reversal (petition denied).
Though the publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table is ending, petition history is still
accessible in some print sources. The Table
is supplemented weekly by West’s Texas Cases
Advance Sheets, and in the Texas
Supreme Court Journal, though neither source provides the user a cumulative
table of all Texas actions with a subsequent appellate history.
Subsequent history can also be located online using Westlaw
and LexisNexis’ citators. In WestlawNext, petition history may be viewed by
clicking on the case’s “History” tab near the top of the page. The direct
history will show the petition’s disposition along with the date. In Lexis
Advance and Lexis.com, subsequent appellate history may be found by viewing the
case’s Shepard’s report. Currently, Bloomberg Law does not provide this
information. In addition, the weekly orders from the Texas Supreme Court (1997-present) may be located on the Texas Judicial Branch's newly updated website, www.txcourts.gov.
For more information about the history of petition and writ
review in Texas, see James Hambleton’s Notations
for Subsequent Histories in Civil Cases, 65 Tex. B.J. 694 (2002).
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