Something completely different

Published on: April 1, 2013

House Bill 325 to Amend Open Beaches Act

State Representative Harold Dutton, Jr. has introduced a bill in the Texas Legislature to amend Texas’ Open Beaches Act. What does this have to do with oil and gas, you may ask? Read on.

Last year, the Texas Supreme Court decided a case interpreting the Open Beaches Act, Severance v. Patterson, 370 S.W.3d 705 (Tex. 2012). The case arose because of Hurricane Rita. Carol Severance owned two beachfront houses on Galveston Island, as rental properties. Because of Hurricane Rita, erosion shifted the beach vegetation line farther landward, causing both homes to be located on the dry beach facing the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, under the Open Beaches Act, the Commissioner of the General Land Office informed Severance that she would have to remove the houses and offered her $40,000 assistance to relocate or demolish them. Severance then sued the Commissioner in US District Court claiming that the Commissioner’s action constituted a taking of her property without compensation under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. Her case was dismissed, and she appealed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court, after analyzing the case, concluded that Texas law was unclear on the matter, and it submitted “certified questions” to the Texas Supreme Court.

To understand the significance of Severance v. Patterson, it is necessary to go back a ways, to the Texas Supreme Court case of Luttes v. State, 324 S.W.2d 167 (1958). In that case, Mr. Luttes was claiming to own about 3,400 acres of “mud flats” lying on the edge of the Laguna Madre in Cameron County. The State of Texas holds title to all submerged lands along the coast, including lands within the Laguna Madre, the long, shallow lagoon that runs between the mainland and Padre Island along much of the Texas Gulf Coast. Mr. Luttes contended that these mud flats were part of his “dry land”, and not “submerged land” belonging to the State.

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Published on: March 12, 2012

EIA Creates New Toy for Energy Geeks

By John McFarland

I love graphs. The Energy Information Administration, the guys that crunch numbers on all things energy-related, have come up with a new way to let us graph-lovers play with their data. The new interface is in its beta testing version, and you can play with it here. The site allows you to create your own graphs by selecting the data you want to depict. This allows you to compare two or more sets of data in graphic form. Here are some examples:

Well Head vs Res Price.jpg

Consumption by sector.jpg

production vs consumption.jpg

Imports vs exports.jpg

Gasoline price vs stocks - Texas.jpg

Try it for yourself. It’s fun, and you may learn something in the process.

Published on: October 15, 2011

Chief Justice John Hemphill – Judge of the Long Knife

By John McFarland

The Texas Supreme Court Historical Society has published an article by David A. Furlow on the life of John Hemphill, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Texas. John Hemphill was a remarkable character, one of the pioneering men and women who settled in Texas during its birth as a nation and then a state.

John Hemphill was born in 1803 in South Carolina to a Presbyterian minister and his wife; went to Jefferson College (now Washington and Jefferson College) in Washington, Pennsylvania; began his legal studies “reading the law” in Columbia, South Carolina in 1829; practiced law in Sumter, South Carolina; served in the U.S. Army in the Seminole War of 1836 in Florida; and moved to Texas in 1838, at the age of 35, two years after
Texas won its independence from Mexico. He set up his law practice in Washington-on-the-Brazos.

In 1840, President Mirabeau B. Lamar appointed Hemphill to the Texas Supreme Court. He also served as a judge of the Fourth Judicial District. On December 5, 1840, he won election to replace Thomas J. Rusk as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In 1846, when Texas joined the Union, Governor J. Pinckney Henderson appointed Hemphill the first Chief Justice of the new Texas Supreme Court, where he served until November 1858. He resigned from the Court to take Sam Houston’s place as United States Senator, when Houston resigned because he refused to support Texas’ withdrawal from the Union. After Texas joined the Confederacy, Hemphill served in the Provisional Confederate Congress, and he died of pneumonia in Richmond, Virginia, in January 1862.

On March 19, 1840, Hemphill presided over an unusual and historic meeting between Comanches and Texas representatives seeking to make peace with the Chomanche tribes, held in San Antonio. The meeting did not go well. The Comanches brought with them a sixteen-year-old-girl, Matilda Lockhart, who had been abducted by the Comanches in 1838. Mary Ann Maverick (a member of the Maverick family that gave their name to unbranded cattle)
was there and described Matilda: “Her head, arms and face were full of bruises and sores, and her nose [was] actually burnt off to the bone–all the fleshy end gone, and a great scab formed on the end of the bone. …. She told a piteous tale of how dreadfully the Indians had
beaten her, and how they would wake her from her sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose.” Matilda’s treatment did not endear the Comanches to the Texans present. Matilda, who understood the Comanche language, told the Texans that the Comanches held another fifteen Texas hostages, whom the Comanches intended to
ransom one by one to the Texans for the highest price they could get. The result was a fight, later named the Council House Fight, in which several of the Comanches were killed. Hemphill, attacked by one
of the chiefs, pulled a “long knife from under his judicial robes and slew his antagonist.” True frontier justice. The result of this failed attempt at peace-making was a long-running war between Texans and Comanches that was not finally concluded until after the Civil War.
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