(As of 13 October 2011, the Texas Criminal Slip Opinions server is almost ready for prime time. The software was 90% done when Texas’s courts of appeals changed the way they published cases. We are working on hammering out some of the big problems. )
Welcome to the Texas Criminal Slip Opinions server β. This is a free (for the moment) service of Houston’s Bennett & Bennett.
Our objective is to make Texas criminal appellate opinions from the Court of Criminal Appeals and the fourteen courts of appeals quickly available to practitioners, all in one place.
While it was already possible to subscribe to CA and CCA opinions via email, fifteen courts had fifteen different websites and fifteen different email notifications. We’ve pulled the opinions together onto one page and enhanced the presentation.
We have excluded some orders and opinions—pro forma denials and extensions of time—but have erred on the side of inclusiveness.
Some courts have started publishing their opinions only in PDF format. We convert those opinions to HTML and publish them, along with opinions that the courts publish in HTML.
The format—a blog—allows you to subscribe via an RSS feed reader. (We know that many lawyers have no idea what that means; for them, we’ll post instructions shortly.)
Eventually, we’d like case references in opinions to link to the cases on Google Scholar. We’re hoping Google will give us permission to automatically access that library of cases.
While the text is public information, the formatting and code is © Bennett & Bennett.
I welcome any suggestions to make this site more useful to you. Please drop me an email.
Thanks,
Mark Bennett
Bennett & Bennett
Houston