Texas Civil Case Fill: Fill & Download for Free

In my fifty years of adult life, I’ve been summoned many times with various results…Shortly after moving to Texas, I received a jury summons from my prior home, New Jersey. I told them I was no longer a resident.Fourteen years later, I moved to Alabama, then received a summons from Texas. You missed me again!Eight years later, I got a summons for jury duty in Alabama. For the first time I had to report for duty. “Today is the day we pick a grand jury,” they announced to the auditorium full of prospective jurors. “The following people have been selected …” I was one of them, no questioning, no opportunity to decline, we were it. (We had filled out the standard questionnaire.)We served for a solid week, had a week off, then did a second week. We heard over 200 cases, covering a wide range of the Alabama Criminal Code, ranging from shoplifting to murder. Many DUIs, and over 100 fraud charges against one defendant.We had additional duties. A field trip to inspect the juvenile detention facility, then tour the county jail and have lunch with the inmates who “Always know when the grand jury is coming because lunch is fried chicken.” Then we had to “write” a report on it. Basically we started from the prior month’s version and made a few edits.Shortly after my grand jury service, I moved to California. Within a year or so, I received a summons for San Diego County jury duty. Because I had served on a jury within the allowed two (or three year?) period, I was excused.Not too much later, it was the Federal District Court that wanted me, and with them, it is for a month term of service, but you only report in person when requested. Typically, one calls in on Sunday evening and may be told, call in next Sunday, or perhaps, report tomorrow. I had to actually go downtown one time, and was not seated on a jury.A few years later, again the Federal District Court summons, similar results.Next summons was from the San Diego County Court. This time I served on a civil case (negligence). It took about 9 days for the trial and deliberations.Then back again to the Federal District Court, this time I served on a criminal case (drug smuggling and transport). After two or three days, testimony finished and i was informed that I was one of the alternates and to go home to wait for a possible call to report back. They did call to say thanks, you are dismissed, and by the way, it was a mistrial because of a hung jury. If I had been in on the deliberations, I was unsure where I’d end up, neither side presented a clear case. Apparently other jurors felt the same way.Finally, four years ago, another summons to the San Diego County Court and I was sitting on another criminal case, resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. Two days of testimony, then two days of deliberation where I was the lone holdout for “not guilty” until we asked the judge about my question about one of the charges. Given his answer, I switched to “guilty.” However, another juror switched from guilty to not-guilty and refused to deliberate her stance. Another hung jury.Scorecard: 9 summonses, 1 grand jury, 1 civil case, 2 criminal cases (1 as alternate, both hung juries)I don’t mind jury duty. I was salaried and my employers paid us our regular wages plus allowed us to keep the small sums the court paid us. Waiting around while the judge handled other business or held sidebar discussions was tedious, but the trials and deliberations generally quite interesting. At each venue, I found the court’s staff did what they could to make it a reasonably tolerable, comfortable experience.

You’re talking about community property, I presume.Current law is hopelessly outdated: most believe that current community property laws can be traced back to the Frankish Period in Germany. Back then, women could not have jobs or careers, nor could they own property or handle money. They were viewed as an extension of their husband. The word marriage is derived from the Latin manus, which means “hand”.If you go back to the earliest inception of Roman law, women were thought of as a man’s child—his adult dependent. Community property laws prevented men from deserting their wives. If they did—or if a man died—the wife was left with some of the community property with which to subsist. Community property laws, back then, were an exercise in gender inequality. Of particular interest is that although all property brought into the marriage was community property, only a man could administer it.We have come a long way since those times, obviously. But there’s still no gender equality. If a woman doesn’t work a day in her life the entire time she is married, contributing exactly zero, she can still cash in on everything that her husband has earned, including his retirement. The traditional “family values” set argue that men should still support women, vis-a-vis community property laws, while those who oppose it state that these laws reduce marriage to an “amoral business relationship.”Current law still assumes that it is not a woman’s lot in life to contribute to the marriage financially (at least not substantively), hence the unequal division of assets for one person’s labor. Statutes gender neutral terminology, of course. But courts can also take into consideration common law when awarding property—and history is filled with civil cases setting precedents of women getting stuff. (When’s the last time you’ve heard of the man getting the house?)Some states, like Texas, look at an equitable division—that is to say, the spouse who contributed the least will leave with the least. Generally, equitable arrangements can be no lower/higher than 30%-70%. For example, when I was married, I was the sole wage earner, so I receive 70 percent of the community property. In other states, it’s still a 50–50 split. And yet in other states, such as Alaska, you have to “opt in” to community property.There’s no one easy answer. Just to say that if you’re a married working man, your wife doesn’t work, and one of you wants a divorce, the man shall pay dearly. Usually through the nose.Amoral business arrangement? I dunno. What do you think? #PrenupsRule

Austin has been liberal for a long time, and out of step with the rest of the state for almost its entire existence. Austin was pro-Union during the Civil War (as was Sam Houston), for example, while the rest of the state’s population was solidly Confederate.There are a number of reasons for this. First, the Hill Country (and Central Texas in general), where Austin is located, was settled not only by the more conservative Scotch-Irish who settled in the eastern parts of Texas most closely aligned with the Old South, but also by Germans, Czechs, and Poles, most of whom were differently educated than most Texans of the time, and many of whom were freethinkers (agnostics and atheists) who came to Texas to escape the political and religious tyranny of their homeland. There is even a monument to these freethinkers of the 1840s-1860s in my brother’s hometown of Comfort, Texas, which was for a long time the only atheist monument in America.In addition, the state chose Austin as its capital and the home of its namesake university. (Texas A&M, built with the federal largesse of the land grant acts, is actually older than the University of Texas, but its original purpose was more narrowly focused.) The University of Texas, being one of the largest universities in the world in the 20th century, attracted an international academic crowd that was, typical for academia, more diverse in its beliefs and thus by necessity more tolerant of different ideas than would otherwise be the norm in a former slave state.Then there was the Depression. Farmers and ranchers in west and central Texas were devastated by the Dust Bowl and the Depression, and FDR’s social programs were a lifeline to them. (In East Texas, on the other hand, Depression-era survivors I have met have described themselves as having never gone hungry, since you could just go down to the bayous and fish and hunt your fill.) Rural electrification of the Hill Country, brought to this part of the nation by LBJ, was another big government spending program that was incredibly popular. In one generation families went from barely eking out an existence in an almost medieval economy to joining the rest of the nation in the 20th century.Then came the 1960s and 1970s. Over the 20th century, Austin had become a kind of capital for Texas artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and weirdos (remember “Slacker”?). During the 1960s especially, Austin was regarded as the only place in the South where liberals not only felt safe but were in the majority. Politicians and individuals could be openly liberal – radical by today’s standards – in Austin. Madalyn Murray O'Hair founded American Atheists in Austin in 1963 and went about her business largely unbothered, something that would not have been the case elsewhere in Texas. Janis Joplin, to cite one famous example, got her start in Austin after having been, in her mind at least, run out of Port Arthur. The Velvet Underground, too radical for even Californian sensibilities at the time, found Austin one of the few places in the country besides Boston where they were welcome, and Sterling Morrison left the band to teach English at UT. Austin was famous for public nudity at Hippie Hollow and (topless only) Barton Springs, and the Drag was the most famous entertainment district in Texas (later replaced by Sixth Street, the Warehouse District, and lately Rainey Street). It was no accident that Nashville rebels, led by Willie Nelson, relocated to Austin and created an entirely new form of country music there in the early 1970s. And in the late 1970s, Austin had more punks per square foot than any city in America, including New York.This radicalism was not confined to politics and pop culture either. It was when he came to Austin in the 1970s and 1980s, coincidentally (or not), that John Wheeler at UT was putting forth questions and speculations about quantum physics that challenged the orthodoxy of the Copenhagen Interpretation and which continue to be hotly debated and researched to this day.If anything, Austin has become significantly less liberal in recent years, even with – maybe especially with - the arrival of putatively liberal Californians (and their real estate spending power). It’s harder for artists and social activists to make a living or afford homes now; in one generation, Austin has gone from being one of the most affordable cities in Texas to the least. Increasingly, Austin’s liberalism is more and more of the limousine variety. But it’s still at odds with the rest of the state, and will likely remain that way.If Texas’ four major cities were the Bass Brothers, Austin would be Ed – off doing his own thing in his own weird way. And that weirdness usually has a liberal bent.