Opinion ID: 2834548
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: What About the Mandate?

Text: Justice Willett’s proposal that our decisions should take effect only when the mandate issues will not work for one primary reason: after many of our opinions there is no mandate. Mandates issue only after a judgment. [36] No mandate issues when we deny a petition, even if we do so by written opinion. Nor do mandates issue in mandamus proceedings, which we decide by “orders” rather than “judgments.” [37] If a mandate is required before this Court’s decisions take effect, then many of them never have and never will. But there’s more. From 1892 until 1978, Texas law prohibited clerks from issuing a mandate until court costs were paid. [38] Thus, for example, the first rules of civil procedure in 1941 provided: On the rendition of a final judgment or decree in the Supreme Court, the clerk of said court shall not issue and deliver the mandate of the court, nor certify the proceedings to the lower court, until all costs accruing in the case in the Supreme Court and the Court of Civil Appeals have been paid . . . [39] If costs were not paid within 12 months, the case was simply dismissed and no mandate ever issued . [40] These rules were replaced in 1978, [41] but it is hard to say how many judgments before then were never followed by a mandate. So which of our opinions have never taken effect? And how would anyone know without looking through files perhaps 100 years old? As we explained in Continental Casualty Co. v. Street in 1963, a mandate is a procedural device intended to keep courts from issuing conflicting orders: The rules relating to the return of the mandate from the appellate to the trial court are . . . primarily procedural in nature. They provide for an orderly dispatch of judicial business by adopting procedures under which both the appellate and trial courts may have knowledge of the status of pending litigation and thus prevent the issuance of conflicting orders by the courts of the trial and appellate levels. [42] Mandates are thus a means of communication between courts; they were not even required to be sent to the parties until 2003. [43] This is why the rules provide for enforcement of our decisions only after the mandate. [44] Postponing enforcement of our decisions is not the same as postponing when they are effective ; indeed an injunction or declaratory judgment cannot be enforced by contempt unless it becomes effective sometime earlier. Appellate courts do not entertain motions for turnover, garnishment, or contempt; those must be filed in the trial court. Absent supersedeas , this means the case can be proceeding in two courts at once. In such cases, the mandate is our notice to the trial court that it can start enforcing a new judgment or proceed with enforcement of the old one without stepping on our toes. This is also why a judgment in an interlocutory appeal “takes effect when the mandate is issued.” [45] Here again, an interlocutory appeal (unlike a final appeal) means the case is pending in two courts at once. As a result, there is a daily potential for conflicting orders. The standard solution is to abate action in one of the two courts, as we do in cases of dominant jurisdiction. [46] Sometimes, a statute or stay from the appeals court keeps the trial court from issuing conflicting orders. [47] But in other cases, it may be best for the trial court to proceed, with the appellate court’s orders taking effect only with the mandate. The reason our rules abate the effective date in interlocutory appeals until the mandate, but say nothing about abating the effective date for final appeals, is because the two cases are not the same.