This Week's Supreme Court Orders & Opinion
The following guest post comes from Dylan Drummond of Godwin Pappas Ronquillo LLP in Dallas:
Today, the sole SCOTX opinion issued on this morning's orders happens to be the third authored opinion in the case of F.F.P. Operating Partners, L.P. v. Duenez, making the opinion in this case perhaps the most revised in the history of the Court. The distinction between this line of cases and the four Edgewood school finance opinions is that the Edgewood plaintiffs brought separate suits challenging successive Legislative solutions to Texas system of school finance, while Duenez has been revised three times on the same underlying facts. The latest entry in the Duenez saga appears to merely make more precise some of the language from the Nov. 3, 2006 iteration, without altering the substantive holding of the original (or intermediate, as it were) opinion. The main thrust of the revision appears to be this passage:
Dram shops are liable if they provide alcoholic beverages to an individual that is obviously intoxicated to the extent that he presents a clear danger to himself and others, and the intoxication of the patron was a proximate cause of the injuries. Tex. Alco. Bev. Code 2.02(b). These requirements were promulgated by the passage of the Act in 1987. In this case, we hold that dram shops are responsible for the proportion of damages they cause or contribute to cause, as set forth in the Proportionate Responsibility Act. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.003.
It is interesting to speculate, however, what briefing prompted the Court to take such a drastic measure as to re-issue an opinion it had already disposed of twice (holding differently both times). The Court's docket shows that the Motion for Rehearing and an Amicus letter were the only documents filed between the Court's Nov. 3 intermediate opinion and today's revision. Judging by the Court's action today, either or both documents must have been particularly persuasive.
