Surely you recall for the tale of The Man With the $16 House, a September cover story about Kenneth Robinson, who occupied a $340,000 Flower Mound home for the cost of filing paperwork with Denton County. Now, Robinson faces eviction from the place that’s been his home since June, according…
Every once in a while, amid the stacks of semi-literate, pro se habeas corpus petitions, trademark suits and product liability complaints, there comes a federal filing so disturbing, so completely awful, that it leaves the reader with nothing but questions. This week, it’s Danny Cantu v. The City of Dallas…
The saga of Texas’s brand-new, Rick-Perry approved sonogram law continues. First, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction issued by Judge Sam Sparks and allowed the law to go into effect. (That law, just to refresh, requires women seeking an abortion to look at a sonogram,…
This little nugget slipped past us last week — somehow, it didn’t make headlines north of Austin — but it draws the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality into a legal tussle with the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project over pollution permits it issued to Dallas-based electric utility Luminant…
Back in November U.S. District Judges Orlando Garcia and Xavier Rodriguez down in San Antonio drew up new congressional and state House and Senate maps, since they so hated the ones submitted by the Texas Legislature. The judges claimed the state willfully ignored the state’s growing Hispanic population, and their…
Three days before Christmas we noted that Anland North, a limited partnership controlled by Ross Perot Jr. and his Hillwood, was threatening to block some Dallas Stars and Dallas Mavericks season-ticket holders from parking in their already-paid-for parking spots at the American Airlines Center. The only thing that kept Junior…
Just four days after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rick Perry’s favorite law — the one requiring women to get a sonogram, listen to a fetal heartbeat and hear a verbal description from a doctor of the sonogram image before they can get an abortion — is…
Back in September, when the city passed its ordinance requiring commercial solid waste companies to dump in South Dallas’s McCommas Bluff landfill, the proposal drew an unexpected foe: a group of Paul Quinn College students, led by school president Michael Sorrell, who protested in front of City Hall to remind…
For years Flashdancer Cabaret — the topless joint that sits on E. Randol Mill just across the freeway from Cowboys Stadium and the Ballpark in Arlington, or so I’ve been told — has been at odds with the city and state, which have tried their best to shutter the joint…
In a 2010 lawsuit filed in federal court, Dr. Tiffiney Barfield-Cottledge claimed the University of North Texas lobbed her application for a faculty position into the dustbin because she’s black. And because they were retaliating against her for allegedly griping to the media. In recompense, she sought a $250,000 settlement…
If you have but a single can or bottle marked “Dublin Dr Pepper,” don’t open it. It’s a collector’s item as of this very moment. That’s because as of 5 p.m. today there is no more Dublin Dr Pepper: From here on out, per a settlement agreement just announced in…
Texas’s dandy new “sonogram law” — which requires abortion-seeking women to look at a sonogram, hear a description of it from her doctor and listen to a fetal heartbeat — is legal, a federal court ruled today. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a temporary injunction, issued by…
Dallas backup wide receiver Kevin Ogletree was planning on stiffing his housesitter for more than $16,000 in expenses incurred while he was out of town during the lockout, according to a lawsuit filed in Dallas County on December 30 by the son of longtime Cowboys strength and conditioning coach Joe…
Teresa Hawthorne, the Dallas County judge who ruled that the state’s death penalty statute was unconstitutional, must recuse herself from a capital murder case, a judge ruled today. Hawthorne was presiding over the capital murder trial of Roderick Harris, who’s accused of killing brothers Alfredo and Carlos Gallardo during a…
Radioactive-waste-burying, Rick Perry-money-giving, Swift-Boating Harold Simmons begins his new year with a federal lawsuit brought by a shareholder in LBJ Freeway-HQ’d Titanium Metals Corporation, where Simmons serves as chairman of the board — the same board also named as defendants in the suit dropped off Friday at the Earle Cabell…
A Dallas-based strip-club chain facing a class-action lawsuit tried to compel its dancers not to join that legal action — and even fired a woman who wouldn’t comply, or so the strippers claim. In a motion filed earlier this month, the dancers also claim that the clubs foisted the agreements…
Curious the things that land in the in-box. Like this, for instance: a statement from attorney Larry Friedman on behalf of Pilar Sanders, who, for now at least, is married to Deion Sanders. I say “for now” because not one hour ago TMZ noted that the former Dallas Cowboy has…
Speaking of the company that operates the American Airlines Center …While going through some federal courthouse docs this morning, which is how everyone should spend the day before the day before Christmas, I discovered that lawsuit concerning the former Chili’s at the AAC lives on, with a trial date set…
It’s become very clear in recent days that Ross Perot Jr. isn’t about to walk away from his feud with Mark Cuban. On December 2, his attorneys notified the Fifth Court of Appeals that he intends to fight Judge Craig Smith’s order tossing that suit in which Perot accuses Cuban…
Back in May, you may recall, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins and commissioners John Wiley Price and Maurine Dickey went before the media to deeply, sincerely and profoundly apologize to all those citizens who may have been evicted without a heads-up in recent years. After a five-month internal audit, the…
Meanwhile, back at the courthouse, this just in: Don Carter, last seen receiving the Larry O’Brien trophy as the Dallas Mavericks’ original owner, has sued Tom Hicks over millions Carter says he’s sunk into real estate around the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and Dr. Pepper Ballpark in Frisco — millions…
“Jesus didn’t want us to have a trial this close to his birthday,” Steven Phillips’s attorney, Tom McKenzie, said yesterday. He was joking, we’re pretty sure. His point: That the prospect of an ex-wife now 20 years divorced from Phillips cutting a slice out of the roughly $4 million paid…
