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“I failed,” Jack Ayres said. “This is the biggest failure of my life. I kept telling that kid and his mother that we would get them their money. I told them the system was straight. It wasn’t. And I failed them both.”

“That case is a national disgrace,” said an East Texas attorney who requested his name not be used (in case he has to appear before either the Texas Supreme Court or the Fifth Circuit). “And it’s Priscilla Owen’s disgrace. Now they want to put her on the Fifth Circuit Court?”

There’s more.

In a case involving a medical-malpractice lawsuit, Justice Owen defended a statute that required the injured party to file suit while he was still a minor. Because he sued after he was eighteen, the suit should be thrown out, she said. But the statute Owen defended had been unanimously declared unconstitutional by a previous court. Her dissent jolted John Cornyn, a conservative member of the court who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2002.

“If we did not follow our own decisions,” Cornyn wrote of the previous unanimous vote, “no issue could ever be considered resolved.” Cornyn lectured Owen about the practice of stare decisis, by which judges stand on previous decisions. He worried about speculative suits that follow when judges ignore earlier decisions and justice becomes a roll of the dice. Although he’s never joined the Sisters of Mercy, Cornyn was bothered that Owen would change the rules of the game and stiff the young man filing suit: “We should give due consideration to the settled expectations of litigants . . . who have justifiably relied on the principles articulated in the previous case.”

Owen seems to prefer the World Wrestling Federation model of civil jurisprudence: decide who is going to win, then choreograph the moves that make it happen.

Justice Owen was exceedingly imaginative in her efforts to shape and rewrite a new Texas law, one that requires minors to get the consent of a parent—or a judge—to get an abortion. Owen went thirteen for fourteen against minors getting an abortion through the “judicial bypass” provision of the parental-consent law. She remained committed to religious conviction—over law—until Bush nominated her for the Fifth Circuit. Her first vote on behalf of a minor seeking an abortion came after her nomination was submitted to the Senate.

Funny how things work out sometimes.

In case after case, Owen followed her own logic to the same conclusion: a minor requesting a judge to approve an abortion should not have one, even though the stated purpose of the “judicial bypass” provision of the law is to protect minors from abusive or nonsupportive parents.

Jane Doe 4 was a seventeen-year-old who told the lower court that when her older sister got pregnant their parents kicked her out of the house and cut off all contact. Concerned that her parents would treat her the same way, Jane 4 went to a district judge and asked him to authorize an abortion without notifying her parents. The majority ruled that “not only did [Jane Doe’s] parents banish her sister from their home, but they have not spoken to her ever since. This type of potential disruption to Doe’s family relationship may weigh against notifying her parents.”

Owen disagreed. She found nothing in the record to prove that Jane Doe’s parents would “withdraw their emotional or financial support after she turns eighteen and graduates from high school.” Then she set a standard that made the law—written to allow a judge to make the decision in place of the parents—unworkable. “I cannot countenance a rule of law that would permit a minor to deceive her parents in order to avoid their expression of disapproval.” For minors requesting a judge to rule in their parents’ place, “disapproval” can be physical abuse or estrangement and abandonment. “Deceit” by keeping potentially abusive parents in the dark is the law’s purpose.

The law was amended to protect kids from parents who would become abusive if they learn their daughter is pregnant and from incestuous fathers whose sexual abuse required the kid to get an abortion in the