On June 24, Texas Supreme Court Justice Evan Young recognized — in his concurring opinion in Texas Dep’t of State Health Services v. Crown Distributing LLC — the contributions of South Texas College of Law Houston students in aiding the Court on a “murky legal question,” noted STCL Houston Professor Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes.
Rhodes is a professor of law and the Charles Weigel II Research Professor of State & Federal Constitutional Law.
The STCL Houston students actually graduated in 2014 and 2015. but they were all enrolled in State Constitutional Law together while in school. They submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of Texas as a class project in Patel v. Texas Dep’t of Licensing & Regulation, a case addressing a challenge brought under the Texas constitutional due-course-of-law clause that was decided by the Court in 2015.
Justice Young, joined by Chief Justice Hecht and Justices Devine and Blacklock, highlighted in the opinion Friday that the briefing the Patel Court received “on the history and context of ‘due course’ came from an amicus — Professor Charles W. ‘Rocky’ Rhodes’s 2014 State Constitutional Law Class. That brief provided an excellent example of how an ‘amicus curiae’ — in its true sense of ‘friend of the court’ — can greatly aid the Court in its consideration of murky legal questions.”
The South Texas graduates who co-authored this amicus brief were Imad Awan, Stephen Compain, Jessica Ebbs, Lauren Hamor, Annarose Harding, Chris Harkey, Jessica Hartman, Kristin Munkittrick, Stephen Nichols, James Northcutt, Christina Rodriguez, Andrea Roth, Maritza Sifuentez, JoAnna Starr, Alexander Taylor, Cameron Wells and S. Blaire Wiersig.
