Wife of Former JP Arrested in Connection With Texas DA Killings

The wife of a former justice of the peace was arrested today on allegations of capital murder in connection with the slayings of the Kaufman County district attorney, his wife and one of his assistant prosecutors.

Off the Shelf: ‘Big, Hot, Cheap and Right,’ a New Look at Texas - Review

This is nothing new, as most any Texan will tell you. But Ms. Grieder, a onetime correspondent for The Economist who now works at Texas Monthly, and a Texan herself, has written a smart little book that counters much of this silliness, and explains why the Texas economy is thriving. It’s called “Big, Hot, Cheap and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas” (PublicAffairs, $26.99). The sad truth, alas, is that it’s probably a lot easier to understand the successes of Texas than it would be to duplicate them.

What might be copied, Ms. Grieder indicates, is the so-called Texas model — that is, a weak state government with few taxes and fewer regulations and services. It would be far harder to replicate the state’s civic DNA, which features traits that can be traced to its decade, beginning in 1836, as a stand-alone nation (independent, suspicious of Washington), the late-1800s cowboy era (self-reliant, fraternal) and the 20th-century introduction of oil and entrepreneurialism (pro-business, skeptical of government). Those values, Ms. Grieder says, created a populace ideal for economic growth: “pragmatic, fiscally conservative, socially moderate and slightly disengaged.”

This is a refreshing book on many levels. Outside writers have been regularly caricaturing the state since the novelist Edna Ferber introduced America to postwar Texas with “Giant” in 1952. The canon ranges from “The Super-Americans,” by John Bainbridge (1961), to “As Texas Goes ... : How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda,” by Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist (2012). Ms. Grieder’s is the rare book that takes stock of the Texas model without ridiculing many of its traditions and politicians.

I tend to look askance at an analysis that attributes a company’s or a state’s success to events two centuries ago, but Ms. Grieder’s history lessons are persuasive. Texas’s laissez-faire mix of weak government, low taxes and scant regulations is deeply rooted in its 1876 Constitution, which was an attempt to vehemently dismantle an oppressive post-Civil War government of radical reconstructionists. Texas business interests flourished after turn-of-the-century legislators passed an early antitrust law, which kept much of its oil and natural resources squarely under local control.

Historically, Ms. Grieder writes: “Texas wasn’t a straightforward pro-business state. It was (and is) pro-Texas business.”

More recently, the state’s economic boom has been a mix of luck and good planning. Strict lending laws allowed Texas to dodge the worst of the housing collapse, while the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement was a boon to the state’s export sector.

But “the secret ingredient,” Ms. Grieder writes, has been the industrial policy of Gov. Rick Perry, offering a generous broth of subsidies and incentives that Texas has used to attract hundreds of businesses that have richly diversified its traditional energy-based economy. This has had the added benefit of insulating Texas from the ups and downs of oil prices.

“The Texas model isn’t an accident, in other words, even if the state Constitution does call for a very stark version of it,” Ms. Grieder says. “Texas has a long tradition of looking outside the government for support — and often finding it. That predates the Texas revolution and was reinforced by the rise of the cattle kingdom and the oil booms.”

Systems and laws aside, Ms. Grieder emphasizes, the crucial component in the Texas boom has been its people, who tend — forget stereotypes — to be tolerant, optimistic and results-oriented. It’s no accident that Houston, a city sometimes caricatured as a haven for obnoxious right-wingers, in 2009 became the country’s largest city to elect an openly gay mayor. The state has benefited from waves of immigration, beginning after the Civil War and persisting to this day.

As outsiders, successful immigrants tend to be hard-working and self-sufficient, and the state’s pro-business culture has made their jobs easier at every turn. Non-Texans tend to look at glib right-wing Texas politicians like Governor Perry — and many others — and assume that the Texas electorate must be similar.

In fact, Ms. Grieder demonstrates, Texas voters are notoriously ambivalent about politics, in large part because the state Constitution gives politicians so little power. As a result, even the worst Texas leaders tend to do little damage.

“Texans are, ultimately, a pragmatic people,” she writes. “Politicians and their excesses can be justified by the economy alone. And that’s one area where no one’s been disappointed. So maybe it doesn’t matter if the state’s leaders breathe fire, pray for rain, turn up at Tea Party rallies and spend all day suing the federal government. How crazy is that, really? Texas is a pretty good place to live; that’s why several million people have moved here since the beginning of this century.”

This is a good book, and Ms. Grieder’s clear, vivid writing makes it downable in a single afternoon. I have only one bone to pick. Ms. Grieder has graciously mentioned a book of mine in her footnotes. Unfortunately, she misspells my last name. And my first. But one can overlook minor errors. This is a promising debut from a promising young author.

Report Urges Higher Pay for Texas Judges

Texas judges haven't gotten a raise since 2005, and they earn less than judges made in 1990 when considering inflation, says a recent report by the Judicial Compensation Commission.

Increasing judicial salaries for district judges, intermediate appellate justices and jurists of the two high courts by more than 21 percent is necessary to attract qualified lawyers to the bench and stop experienced jurists from leaving, says the report.

Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Dale Wainwright says financial considerations factored significantly into his decision to leave the high court in September. For a Supreme Court justice, he says, "The difference between what they are making in the public sector and what they could be making in the private sector can be several million dollars every few years."

Judges and their families make a financial sacrifice so the judge can serve, he says, and the relatively low salary shortens their tenures.

"I have the utmost respect to folks who do public service. … Anything the Legislature can do to help compensate the members of our judiciary better would only improve the bench," says Wainwright, partner in Bracewell & Giuliani in Austin.

Judicial Compensation Commission member Pat Mizell notes that judges' compensation is "extraordinarily low" compared to the pay of private-sector lawyers. For example, the salary of a district judge is much lower than a starting lawyer at his firm, Vinson & Elkins in Houston.

"It's $40- to $50,000 less than what a 25-year-old kid out of law school makes," he says, adding, "We're already in a situation where it is starting to affect the quality of the judiciary. Good judges are having a very difficult time making ends meet under the current salary structure."

The 80th Legislature created the commission, and the governor appoints members, subject to Senate consent.

THE REPORT

The state pays the entire salary of jurists of the two high courts. Intermediate appellate justices and district court judges receive the majority of their salaries from the state, with supplemental pay from counties. The commission recommends increasing state salaries across the board by 21.1 percent to 21.5 percent.

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Report Urges Higher Pay for Texas Judges

Texas judges haven't gotten a raise since 2005, and they earn less than judges made in 1990 when considering inflation, says a recent report by the Judicial Compensation Commission.

Increasing judicial salaries for district judges, intermediate appellate justices and jurists of the two high courts by more than 21 percent is necessary to attract qualified lawyers to the bench and stop experienced jurists from leaving, says the report.

Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Dale Wainwright says financial considerations factored significantly into his decision to leave the high court in September. For a Supreme Court justice, he says, "The difference between what they are making in the public sector and what they could be making in the private sector can be several million dollars every few years."

Judges and their families make a financial sacrifice so the judge can serve, he says, and the relatively low salary shortens their tenures.

"I have the utmost respect to folks who do public service. … Anything the Legislature can do to help compensate the members of our judiciary better would only improve the bench," says Wainwright, partner in Bracewell & Giuliani in Austin.

Judicial Compensation Commission member Pat Mizell notes that judges' compensation is "extraordinarily low" compared to the pay of private-sector lawyers. For example, the salary of a district judge is much lower than a starting lawyer at his firm, Vinson & Elkins in Houston.

"It's $40- to $50,000 less than what a 25-year-old kid out of law school makes," he says, adding, "We're already in a situation where it is starting to affect the quality of the judiciary. Good judges are having a very difficult time making ends meet under the current salary structure."

The 80th Legislature created the commission, and the governor appoints members, subject to Senate consent.

THE REPORT

The state pays the entire salary of jurists of the two high courts. Intermediate appellate justices and district court judges receive the majority of their salaries from the state, with supplemental pay from counties. The commission recommends increasing state salaries across the board by 21.1 percent to 21.5 percent.

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Texas judge halts oil pipeline work

HOUSTON (AP) - A Texas judge has ordered TransCanada to temporarily halt work on a private property where it is building part of an oil pipeline designed to carry tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, the latest legal battle to plague a project that has encountered numerous obstacles nationwide.

Gusher of Work Has West Texas Firms Hiring Laterals

James Leeton doesn't mince words when describing how crazy-busy West Texas lawyers are in the midst of the current oil and gas drilling boom.

"It's like out of the world. It's frantic," says Leeton, a shareholder in Bullock Scott in Midland, the West Texas city that's dealing with a shortage of housing, crowded schools and restaurants, and rush hour traffic due to the energy business madness.

Leeton isn't the only Midland lawyer gleefully talking about how busy firms are because of the boom in drilling in the Permian Basin in West Texas.

"We are very, very busy -- busier than I guess we have ever been," says Robert Bledsoe, a founding member in the 37-year-old Cotton Bledsoe Tighe & Dawson in Midland.

"If a lawyer lives in Midland and he's not busy, it's because he doesn't want to be," Bledsoe says.

The big boom in energy business is due to the relatively high price of oil, which improves the profitability of new-technology drilling methods such as fracking -- injecting fluid into cracks in a rock formation to allow more oil and gas to flow -- and horizontal drilling. The average price of a barrel of crude oil in 2002 was $29.12, compared to $94.87 in 2011.

Bledsoe says the current energy boom is nothing like booms of the past.

"We have wells being drilled in the city limits; we have wells being drilled all over the county, all over adjacent counties. The boom is because of new discoveries and new methods of producing what's being discovered. That's the basis of it," he says, adding that there's a lot more drilling success using the new technology.

"It's the busiest I've been since I've lived in Midland," says Robert Spears, a shareholder in Lynch Chappell & Alsup, who has done oil and gas work in Midland for the last 42 years. He says it's busier than the legendary boom that started in 1973 and ended around nine years later.

Economist Ray Perryman, president of The Perryman Group of Waco, Texas, says the price of oil is a major factor in the energy boom. He says the Permian Basin, located in West Texas, has a higher percentage of oil relative to natural gas, so the current high price of oil "works in favor of the region."

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Texas death row inmate loses impairment appeal

HOUSTON (AP) - A federal appeals court has rejected an East Texas inmate's claims that he's mentally impaired and ineligible for execution.

Protesters Gather at Keystone XL Site in Texas

Here, among the woods and farmland, what might be one of the last pitched battles over the Keystone XL oil pipeline has been unfolding for weeks now, since construction of the controversial project’s southern leg began in August.

As bulldozers and diggers churn up a 50-foot-wide path for the pipeline — this portion will run from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf Coast — a small group of environmental activists have taken to the towering trees in its way.

And with the blessing of some landowners who live here, and whose property the pipeline will cross, the protesters have fashioned a web of tree houses, structures and pulleys in a last-ditch effort to keep the enormous project from rumbling forward.

“Initially, a lot of the environmental movement on a national scale had kind of written this fight off,” said Ron Seifert, a spokesman for the Tar Sands Blockade, a group of environmental activists who have gathered near Winnsboro and contend that the oil sands crude that the pipeline will carry is especially toxic.

“But we have awakened folks from that slumber,” he said. “I think now there is an understanding that people are not going to give this up.”

TransCanada, the company behind the project, said construction had not been impeded in most cases, proceeding safely around where some activists have remained perched in the oaks for nearly three weeks. The tree sitters, as they are known, have survived on canned food and water and spent much of their time reading.

But at times, the company acknowledged, the situation has become dangerous. “In one case, protesters jumped underneath a truck and tied themselves to the rear axle with plastic,” Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said by e-mail. “They were fortunate that the driver saw them go under — if he had not, it could have had very serious consequences for everyone.”

Mr. Howard said the company was making sure that work sites were safe, “even for those who are breaking the law and trespassing on these locations.”

Still, as protesters have staked out positions in tree platforms 70 feet high and along a 100-foot-long wall lashed together with timber, tensions in East Texas have risen along the route of the pipeline — slated for completion next year.

Off-duty police officers, hired by a TransCanada contractor, patrol the perimeter of construction sites day and night. This month, one man chained himself to a concrete capsule buried in the dirt before police managed to disconnect and arrest him, Mr. Seifert said.

And on Oct. 4, the actress Daryl Hannah was arrested alongside a local landowner, Eleanor Fairchild, 78, after they blocked heavy equipment clearing a path through Ms. Fairchild’s property.

Both women were taken to the Wood County Jail on criminal trespassing charges and released, according to jail records. Ms. Hannah also faces resisting arrest charges.

Sheriff Bill Wansley of Wood County did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Seifert said 21 protesters had been arrested since the end of August.

It is not by accident that environmental activists chose Winnsboro, about 100 miles east of Dallas, to make their stand. They have found an unlikely ally in the battle-weary Texas families here who have fought the project for years.

One landowner, Susan Scott, said she had no idea the pipeline would carry oil sands crude, and signed over a right of way to TransCanada only because she feared a lawsuit.

Ms. Scott, 62, has since taken the $22,000 she was compensated and buried it in a fruit jar on her 60-acre property.

“I don’t care if it rots. It’s tainted money,” she said, staring at a thick scar that now skirts her land. “I felt like I was guilty of destroying my farm.”

Mr. Howard said TransCanada understood that some landowners were not in favor of the pipeline and that the company was respectful of those people whose land it needed.

“We have always been up front about the materials that are going into the pipeline,” he said.

At some level, the standoff also belies a deeper sense of inevitability around Keystone XL.

This year, after saying TransCanada must reroute the project around environmentally delicate areas in Nebraska, President Obama encouraged the company to submit a fresh application to the State Department.

And he embraced the less controversial southern portion of Keystone XL, which received final permits from the Army Corps of Engineers this summer.

A particularly crushing blow for opponents came in August, when a Lamar County judge ruled that TransCanada could use eminent domain to condemn private land to build the pipeline.

In another setback, TransCanada recently sued a leading pipeline opponent, a Texas landowner, David Daniel, for refusing to recognize a 2010 easement agreement he reached with the company, his lawyer said.

Mr. Daniel, 45, a soft-spoken carpenter, has since settled the lawsuit and asked the protesters to leave his property.

“It’s actually out of respect for David Daniel that we stay,” Mr. Seifert said. “I stand by the fact that protecting his forest is the best thing for him, the best thing for the community, the best thing for the Planet Earth.”

On a recent day on Mr. Daniel’s land, off-duty police officers warmed themselves by a campfire, as a protester used a rope to shimmy from platform to platform through the oak canopy above them.

Mr. Daniel was there, too. He gazed up at a tree house he built — now being used by the protesters — turned around and walked quietly back toward his home.

Compensation for Chief Legal Officers at Large Texas Companies Up 11 Percent

General counsel who are among the highest-paid executives at large Texas companies earned more on average in 2011 than in 2010, according to Texas Lawyer's annual Corporate Roster, which reports on GC compensation.

Compensation for chief legal officers at 51 large Texas companies averaged $2,198,109 in 2011, up 11.8 percent compared to an average of $1,966,590 at 48 large Texas companies in 2010.

It's the second year in a row that average total compensation for the GCs improved on a year-to-year basis, following two years of declines, and the highest average since 2007, when compensation averaged $1,991,410 for 51 general counsel at 51 Texas companies.

GC pay packages continue to exceed the average profits per partner at large Texas firms. In 2011, partners in the 25 highest-grossing firms in Texas made $924,280 on average, which is less than half of the $2,198,109 average compensation for the GCs at large Texas companies in 2011.

Wayne Watts, senior executive vice president and general counsel at AT&T Inc. in Dallas, heads the list of Texas' highest-paid GCs, with compensation totaling $8,505,373 in 2011, including equity valued at $3,407,689.

In an emailed statement, AT&T writes that it "remains committed to paying for performance, and Mr. Watts' compensation reflects this: in 2011, more than 85 percent of his target compensation was tied to performance.

"Mr. Watts' compensation also reflects his responsibilities as general counsel of one of the world's largest telecom companies and the 12th largest corporation in the United States. During 2011 he effectively guided the company's regulatory filings and compliance matters in addition to providing support for day-to-day operations and M&A activity -- and successfully managed litigation matters, including 158 appeals to various Federal and State Courts of Appeal and 10 to the United States Supreme Court."

Right behind Watts on the best-paid list are Robert Reeves of Anadarko Petroleum Corp.; Larry Hutchison of Torchmark Corp.; and John Wombwell of Plains Exploration and Production Co.

All but six of the 51 general counsel on the best-paid list racked up at least $1 million in compensation in 2011, including the value of their equity compensation. That's more than in 2010, when 40 of the 48 general counsel on the best-paid list earned more than $1 million in compensation.

Texas Lawyer has reported on general counsel compensation in the annual Corporate Roster for the past 20 years.