January 29, 2026
Last week the statewide 15th Court of Appeals handed down an opinion deciding a pro se appeal of a protective order that prevented a father from having contact with his children on grounds that he committed family violence. The case originated in a Collin County district court, was appealed to the Dallas Court of Appeals, and transferred to the 15th Court of Appeals by SCOTX.
We hope others are scratching their heads about this just like we are. We suppose it’s plausible that until the 15th Court gets up to full speed (whatever that may look like; it appears to us that it’s running pretty hot right now), it may have some additional capacity to take spillovers from the other courts of appeals. [We don’t purport to know if this is actually true.] We also suppose that, just as there was some grumbling about the creation of the court in the first place, there might be some more about differential consideration of the “report cards” that each justice must submit to the Office of Court of Administration. Or there might be some theory somewhere that the 15th Court should be treated equally with the other 14 courts of appeals when it comes to the transfer docket. Perhaps it’s a little bit of all of these.
Even so, we don’t think this approach makes any sense, certainly not in the long term at least. The whole purpose of a statewide intermediate appellate court is to collect cases of statewide importance in one place. As important as family law matters clearly are, they don’t fit this description. Similarly, channeling appeals from decisions of the Business Court to a single court of appeals makes perfect sense because the jurisprudence is of a general nature that applies equally no matter where in the state the business activity takes place.
It just seems odd that a local family law dispute in Collin County should end up in a statewide court sitting in Austin with legislatively prescribed jurisdiction over a very specific list of matters. A quick perusal of submitted cases currently on the 15th Court’s docket shows 25 cases. These include very significant matters, including a huge media lawsuit against the DPS and a district attorney, a dispute between industrial electricity consumers and the PUC, a TCEQ appeal against the National Wildlife Federation, three state tax disputes involving major companies, several suits involving the Texas Health and Human Services Commission—the list goes on. Everything on this list looks complicated and important and will require the court’s undivided attention for a long time.
While we acknowledge that 25 cases doesn’t seem like a lot when other courts of appeals have multiples of that number, it’s simply not about the quantity. As one of the statewide organizations that encouraged the Legislature to create this court with this particular jurisdiction, we would like to see do exclusively what the Legislature told it to do.
