How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Texas reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of Texas / Joined 2002 / Active

Laura Carter Higley

Justice, Court of Appeals of Texas

Laura Carter Higley is a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas, serving since 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2002 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Court of Appeals of Texas	–	–

Education

Vanderbilt University

Judicial Record

In our data, Higley authored 281 published opinions for the court (2003–2019), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: In the Interest of J.M.T. (178 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 157 of these were attributed to Higley by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2017	In the Interest of J.M.T.†	519 S.W.3d 258	178
2004	Villalon v. Bank One	176 S.W.3d 66	159
2006	Mungin v. State	192 S.W.3d 793	148
2005	Greene v. Young	174 S.W.3d 291	140
2007	Winchek v. American Exp. Travel Related Services Co., Inc.	232 S.W.3d 197	134
2012	Khan v. GBAK Properties, Inc.†	371 S.W.3d 347	110
2004	Wright v. Sage Engineering, Inc.	137 S.W.3d 238	109
2008	Scott Bader, Inc. v. Sandstone Products, Inc.	248 S.W.3d 802	86
2008	Lumpkin v. Department of Family & Protective Services	260 S.W.3d 524	79
2019	In re R.J.†	579 S.W.3d 97	78
2007	Potcinske v. McDonald Property Investments, Ltd.	245 S.W.3d 526	78
2005	Tri-State Building Specialties, Inc. v. NCI Building Systems, L.P.	184 S.W.3d 242	76
2009	Maloney v. State	294 S.W.3d 613	74
2006	Parker v. State	192 S.W.3d 801	68
2005	Raymond v. Raymond	190 S.W.3d 77	68

Showing the 15 most-cited of 287 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Laura Carter Higley on?: Laura Carter Higley is a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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23 years on the Court of Appeals of Texas. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).