§ 26.001.Adoption of Rules by Supreme Court

A rulemaking directive, and it explains why Texas class action law lives in the rules rather than in this chapter.

The supreme court shall adopt rules to provide for the fair and efficient resolution of class actions, and shall adopt rules under this chapter on or before December 31, 2003.

The Legislature could have written a class action statute. It chose instead to direct the court to write rules, subject to the mandatory guidelines this chapter supplies — which keeps class procedure in the same instrument as the rest of Texas civil procedure and allows it to be amended without legislation.

The result is Rule 42, which contains the certification requirements — numerosity, commonality, typicality, adequacy, and the predominance and superiority tests. None of that is in this chapter, and a reader looking here for the standard for certifying a class will not find it.

The deadline has passed and the section has not been repealed. Subsection (b) reads as a historical instruction now, but it dates the chapter precisely to the 2003 tort reform legislation.

What the chapter does contain is three constraints on those rules — the fee guidelines and the jurisdictional plea sequencing — which is where the Legislature made its own choices rather than deferring.