page_title: Texas Courts of Appeals
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Texas Courts of Appeals / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Harris County Courthouse — in Houston, Harris County, Texas. This site has served as the courthouse square for Harris (Originally Harrisburg) County since the completion of the first county courthouse, a two-story frame structure, in April 1838. Later courthouses were constructed on this site in 1851, 1860 and 1884. The present structure, which was built in 1909-1910, served as the fifth Harris County Courthouse at this location. It was designed in 1909 by Charles Erwin Barglebaugh, an associate in the prominent Dallas architectural firm of Lang and Winchell. The building features a Neoclassical style design. Outstanding details include the domed roof, ornate central projections, or risalits, with Corinthian columns, and elaborate ornamentation of terra cotta, limestone and masonry. Building materials include pink Texas granite and light brown St. Louis brick. During construction of the courthouse, county offices were housed in a nearby theater. Shortly after a new criminal courthouse and jail facility was built east of the square in 1952, this structure was remodeled and used as the Harris County Civil Courts Building. Beginning in 2009, the county restored the exterior and interior public spaces to their original 1910 appearances. Now in its second century serving the citizens of Harris County, the 1910 courthouse is a dramatic example civic architecture and a symbol of Harris County's dynamic growth in the early part of the twentieth century. The Harris County Civil Courts Building is in the National Register of Historic Places in Houston, Texas.
context_page_description: The Texas Courts of Appeals are part of the Texas judicial system. In Texas, all cases appealed from district and county courts, criminal and civil, go to one of the fourteen intermediate courts of appeals, with one exception: death penalty cases. The latter are taken directly to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the court of last resort for criminal matters in the State of Texas. The highest court for civil and juvenile matters is the Texas Supreme Court. While the Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals each have nine members, the size of the intermediate court of appeals is set by statute and varies greatly.
  The total number of appellate court seats currently stands at 80, ranging from three to thirteen per court. To equalize caseloads, the Texas Supreme Court regularly transfers batches of cases from one court to another. The transferee court must then apply the precedents of the court from which the case was sent, rather than its own, unless there is no controlling precedent from the court from which the appeal originated.
  Appellate courts consisting of more than three justices hear and decide cases in panels of three.
context_section_description: Courts of civil appeals in Texas were established in 1891 by constitutional amendment to help handle the increasing load of the court system. They had jurisdiction to hear appeals and mandamus petitions of any civil case from their region, with the regions decided by the legislature. The amendment provided that three-judge courts of appeals were to be created by legislature, and in 1892, the legislature created 3 courts of appeals: The First Court of Civil Appeals in Galveston, the Second Court of Civil Appeals in Fort Worth, and the Third Court of Civil Appeals in Austin. In 1893, the legislature created the Fourth Court of Civil Appeals in San Antonio out of territory taken from the first and third courts, and the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas. In 1907, the legislature created the Sixth Court of Civil Appeals in Texarkana. Then in 1911, the Seventh Court of Civil Appeals in Amarillo and the Eighth Court of Civil Appeals in El Paso were created. Soon after that, the Ninth Court of Civil Appeals was created in Beaumont in 1915, the Tenth was created in Waco in 1923, and the Eleventh was created in Eastland in 1925.
  In 1957, after Hurricane Audrey severely damaged the Galveston County Courthouse, the legislature moved the First Court of Appeals to Houston (where it sits today) and required Harris County to provide facilities.
  It was not until the 1970s that any more courts were created with the Twelfth Court of Civil Appeals in Tyler, the Thirteenth in Corpus Christi and Edinburg, and the Fourteenth in Houston. The latter exercises concurrent jurisdiction with the First Court. 
  In 1977, the legislature increased the number of judges of various courts and authorized courts of appeals to sit in "panels" of not fewer than three judges.
  On September 1, 1981, all Courts of Civil Appeals were given criminal jurisdiction, and in 1985 a constitutional amendment was passed so that all courts were known as "Courts of Appeals" instead of "Courts of Civil Appeals." Until 1981, all criminal appeals cases went directly to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and all cases involving capital punishment still do.
  In January 2019, a large number of newly elected justices took office, which required panels that included incumbents who were defeated in the November 2018 elections to be reconstituted. Because of similar turnover in many metropolitan trial courts, pending mandamus cases had to be abated and remanded for the new trial court judge to reconsider the challenged order of his or her predecessor.  
  The overall effect of the November 2018 Democratic sweep of the appellate courts in Houston, Dallas, and Austin was to make the intermediate appellate judiciary more diverse in terms of party affiliation, gender, and race/ethnicity, as can be seen by comparing the demographic statistics reported by the Office of Court Administration for 2018 and 2019.
caption: The Old Harris County Courthouse, home of the First Court of Appeals of Texas
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