Opinion ID: 2381510
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Docket Backlog

Text: The next justification offered by the dissenters for invoking the legal fiction of inconvenience is that judges will be overworked. Not only will foreigners take our jobs, as we are told in the popular press; now they will have our courts. The xenophobic suggestion that foreigners will take over our courts forcing our residents to wait in the corridors of our courthouses while foreign causes of action are tried, Gonzalez dissent, 786 S.W.2d at 690, is both misleading and false. It is the height of deception to suggest that docket backlogs in our state's urban centers are caused by so-called foreign litigation. This assertion is unsubstantiated empirically both in Texas and in other jurisdictions rejecting forum non conveniens. [9] Ten states, including Texas, have not recognized the doctrine. Within these states, there is no evidence that the docket congestion predicted by the dissenters has actually occurred. The best evidence, of course, comes from Texas itself. Although foreign citizens have enjoyed the statutory right to sue defendants living or doing business here since the 1913 enactment of the predecessor to Section 71.031 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, reaffirmed in the 1932 decision in Allen, Texas has not been flooded by foreign causes of action. Moreover, the United States Supreme Court has indicated that docket congestion is a wholly inappropriate consideration in virtually every other context. Robertson, supra, 103 L.Q.Rev. at 408. See Thermtron Products, Inc. v. Hermansdorfer, 423 U.S. 336, 344-45, 96 S.Ct. 584, 589-90, 46 L.Ed.2d 542 (1976) (remanding a case to state court because the federal court considers itself too busy to try it is improper). See also United States v. Reliable Transfer Co., 421 U.S. 397, 408, 95 S.Ct. 1708, 1714, 44 L.Ed.2d 251 (1975) (Congestion in the courts cannot justify a legal rule that produces unjust results in litigation....). If we begin to refuse to hear lawsuits properly filed in Texas because they are sure to require time, we set a precedent that can be employed to deny Texans access to these same courts. Nor does forum non conveniens afford a panacea for eradicating congestion: Making the place of trial turn on a largely imponderable exercise of judicial discretion is extremely costly. Even the strongest proponents of the most suitable forum approach concede that it is inappropriately time-consuming and wasteful for the parties to have to litigate in order to determine where they shall litigate. If forum non conveniens outcomes are not predictable, such litigation is bound to occur.... In terms of delay, expense, uncertainty, and a fundamental loss of judicial accountability, the most suitable forum version of forum non conveniens clearly costs more than it is worth. Robertson, supra, 103 L.Q.Rev. at 414, 426.