- Owen consistently reverses jury decisions involving claims of wrongful discharge, injury on the job, and worker compensation;
- Owen frequently dissents in cases upholding protections against discrimination, sexual harassment, and other workplace abuses;
- Owen consistently dissents in cases involving upholding consumer protections, narrowly interpreting laws that protect consumers;
- Owen has consistently favored overturning jury verdicts that would hold business accountable for abuses;
- Owen supported the reduction and elimination of buffer zones designed to protect reproductive health care clinics in Houston;
- Owen opposed a woman's right to choose in at least thirteen cases involving the ability of pregnant minors to obtain an abortion if a judge finds them mature enough to make their own decision;
- Owen has been accused of judicial activism by her Republican colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court, including Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Montgomery Independent School District v. Davis
The Texas Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of a teacher who had been discharged through the non-renewal of her contract. Writing the dissent, Owen advocated a rewriting of the Education Code that would have had a negative effect on teachers' rights.
FM Properties Operating Co. v. City of Austin
Private landowners had attempted to get around "any environmental regulations" by exempting themselves if those regulations weren't consistent with the landowners' water quality and land use plans. The majority opinion targeted Owen's dissent specifically, calling it "inflammatory rhetoric" and stating that the opinion she wrote was "based on a flawed premise."
- Parental Notification: "In no less than a dozen cases in which the Texas Supreme Court was asked to allow a pregnant teenager to bypass the state's parental notification requirement and have an abortion, Owen voted every time to deny the bypass and created hurdles that were not written in the state's law. In one case, when lawyers for a high school senior requested that the court act quickly on the girl's request for permission to bypass the notification requirement, Owen wrote a dissent that asked: "Why then the rush to judgment?" The girl was in her 15th week of pregnancy at the time. " [San Antonio Express-News, July 21, 2002]
- Choice: "Owen holds an extremely narrow view of a minor's right to abortion -- one that a majority of her colleagues on the Texas high court have rejected as inconsistent with state law." [CNN.com July 2002] http://edition.cnn.com/2002/LAW/07/columns/fl.colb.owen.07.31/
"In an 8-0 decision, the Republican justices of the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the state could decline to fund medically necessary abortions for indigent women covered by Medicaid. The ruling overturned a finding by a midlevel appeals court that denying needed medical help only to poor women violated the Equal Rights Amendment of the Texas Constitution. Among the Texas Supreme Court's unanimous majority in this latest abortion case is Justice Priscilla Owen. The court's ruling in this case is exactly the sort of tortured jurisprudence that caused Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to reject President Bush's nomination of Owen to be a justice on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Texas may be saddled with justices who elevate partisan ideology above law and logic, but justice and reason should discourage their infliction on the nation. [Houston Chronicle, January 4, 2003]
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