Fifth Court of Appeals

Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas, TexasThe Fifth Court of Appeals sits in downtown Dallas in the George Allen Courthouse, located at 600 Commerce Street (thus, this blog’s name). The Fifth Court is the smallest Texas court of appeals in geographic jurisdiction (only six counties, one of which it shares with another court), and the largest in personnel, with 13 sitting Justices.

Other statistical information about the Court’s docket appears in the Annual Statistical Report for the Texas Judiciary. 3.5 million people live in the jurisdiction of the Fifth Court – a population larger than almost half the states, comparable to that of Connecticut and Oklahoma.

Counties served by Fifth Court of AppealsThe Fifth Court hears appeals from Collin, Dallas, Grayson, Kaufman, Rockwall, and Hunt (shared with the Sixth Court of Appeals) Counties. The Legislature created the court in 1893, as the Panic of 1893 wreaked havoc on the young city of Dallas and its then-population of roughly 40,000. A 125th-anniversary celebration for the Fifth Court in 2018 offered this informative history of the development and expansion of the Court since its founding.

The 2018 elections had a transformative effect on the Court, creating an eight-Justice Democratic majority on what had previously been an all-Republican court.  I’ve written about that change in a recent Dallas Morning News op-edTexas Lawbook article, and a mid-2019  CLE presentation about the first opinions from the newly-constituted Court.