Justice Evan Young
In an opinion concurring with the Texas Supreme Court’s denial of a city’s petition for review in a Tort Claims Act case, Justice Evan Young pointed out a conflict between the First and Fourteenth Court of Appeals that the Court will eventually need to address.
City of Houston v. Ashley Harris (No. 24-0833; October 31, 2025) arose from a collision between an unmarked, city-owned truck driven by a Houston police officer on his way to work and another motorist. The motorist sued the City for damages under the Tort Claims Act. In its response to Plaintiff’s request for admission, the City admitted that the officer had been acting within the scope of his employment at the time of the accident. Following additional discovery, the City obtained the trial court’s leave to change its admission to a denial. It then moved for summary judgment on the basis of sovereign immunity because the officer acted outside the scope of his employment. The trial court denied the motion, and the Houston [14th] Court of Appeals affirmed.
The court of appeals considered the superseded admissions as evidence before the trial court in the summary judgment hearing, although the City had properly amended its initial response to Plaintiff’s request. Justice Young observed that in a similar case, the Houston [1st] Court of Appeals had reached the opposite conclusion, holding that “superceded admissions do not constitute summary-judgment evidence once a party has properly amended them.” Valdez v. City of Houston, No. 01-21-00070-CV, 2022 WL 3970066, at *4 (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] Sept. 1, 2022, no pet.). The First Court reasoned that once amended, “the City’s initial admissions were no longer before the trial court nor was the court at liberty to consider them as evidence in ruling on the City’s motion for summary judgment.” Hence the conflict.
While expressing no opinion on which court of appeals got it right, Justice Young indicated that the First Court’s ruling made sense from an efficiency standpoint, since converting every superseded admission into a fact issue “can only increase the time and cost of responding to requests for admission and gum up the litigation process.” Unfortunately, as Justice Young observed, the City failed to object to the admissibility of its superseded admission as summary-judgment evidence except on grounds of timeliness precluded full appellate review of the issue. He suggested that future litigants in this particular bind preserve the issue for appeal so that SCOTX could have the opportunity to break the tie.
