Elon Musk’s lawsuit-plagued SpaceX rocket company is departing Delaware for a new legal home base in Texas just as the Lone Star State rolls out a new, separate court system for businesses that will allow Republican Texas Governor — and longtime Musk ally — Greg Abbott to handpick judges.
Texas’s oil and gas industries, alongside a host of other corporate interests, lobbied hard last year for the state’s new business court system, which will begin hearing cases this September. The fierce support from Big Oil, Texas’s largest industry, was evidence, critics charged, that business interests in Texas were effectively trying to buy their own courts.
Despite pushback, businesses succeeded. After lawmakers brought the bill to his desk, Abbott signed the proposal into law in June. Texas has now created what critics argue is a two-tiered system of justice, where cases involving massive corporations are funneled into separate courts and heard by judges appointed personally by the governor.
