Court Opinion

ID: 9730173
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:03:31.126516+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:04.493967
License: Public Domain

LOUIS GOHMERT, JR., Chief Justice,
concurring.
I concur in the result of the majority opinion because it is consistent with the latest, highest authority. However, it bears noting that opinions such as that expressed in Brannon v. Pacific Employers Ins. Co., 148 Tex. 289, 224 S.W.2d 466, 469 (1949) and others including Firemen’s Insurance Co. v. Board of Regents, 909 S.W.2d 540 (Tex.App.-Austin 1995, writ denied) were well conceived and logically written when stating that in a plea to the jurisdiction, the trial court must ordinarily base its decision solely on the pleadings. In Bland Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Blue, 34 S.W.3d 547, 554 (Tex.2000), the supreme court disapproved the language in the Firemen’s Insurance Co. case to the extent it, and its cited precedent, limited a trial court’s consideration to the pleadings in deciding a plea to the jurisdiction. Citing a damage issue, the Bland decision attempted to distinguish its well reasoned opinion in the Brannon case from that of the logical follow up in Firemen’s, a case in which the highest court felt comfortable enough to deny the 1995 application for writ.
Consideration of evidence in pleas to the jurisdiction, as is apparently now authorized in many situations, confuses the law by merging pleas to the jurisdiction into motions for summary judgment. As appellate courts, we should endeavor to make the law consistent and logical. Bleeding one legal concept into another can slowly bleed the life out of the law. At a time when lawyers and laymen alike are yearning for clarity in law, graying areas that once were acutely clear is not helpful.
Requiring a litigant to, in effect, prove himself worthy of being in court with evidence on a plea to the jurisdiction confounds the notion of open courts. Though it would seem more appropriately addressed as a no-evidence summary judgment matter, evidentiary justification for being in court is now apparently required in a scenario as is before us. In the present case, a summary judgment motion and ruling thereon would certainly have been understandable after nine years of litigation without a trial.
In another vein, when pleadings lack clarity or specificity, special exceptions are available. Special exceptions might have been anticipated in this case years ago as some of the allegations of Appellants are obscure, general, or insufficient on their face. Others do not involve an exception to sovereign immunity. Some may. However, this case involves the ruling on a plea to the jurisdiction. Were this a ruling on a summary judgment, there would have been no concurring opinion, but rather one unanimous opinion in this case.
*12Nonetheless, the learned trial court followed, as required of it as well as our court, the ruling in Bland Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Blue, 34 S.W.3d 547, 554 (Tex.2000). Until such time as the law may be modified again by the court above, we must affirm.