§ 6.001.State and Federal Agencies Exempt from Bond for Court Costs or Appeal

An exemption list, and it covers three kinds of security.

A listed entity may not be required to file a bond for court costs in a suit it files or for an appeal or writ of error, and is not required to give a surety for the issuance of a bond to take out a writ of attachment, writ of sequestration, distress warrant, or writ of garnishment.

The third exemption is the substantial one. Those writs seize property before judgment, and the surety exists to answer for a wrongful seizure. Removing it removes the protection for whoever is on the other end.

The justification is that the state can pay. A bond secures a solvent defendant against a judgment-proof plaintiff, and the government is neither.

Eleven entities are listed: this state, a department of this state, the head of a department, a county, and then a set of federal bodies — the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, the Veterans’ Administration and its administrator, a national mortgage savings and loan insurance corporation operating statewide, and the FDIC in its capacity as receiver or in its corporate capacity.

The federal entries are a record of an era. They date from a period when federal housing and deposit agencies were routinely litigating foreclosures and bank failures in Texas courts.

Subsection (c) is a real limit on the exemption. A county or district attorney is not exempted from filing a bond to take out an extraordinary writ unless the commissioners court approves for a county action, or the attorney general approves for a state action.

So the pre-judgment writs come with a check. A prosecutor seizing property without a bond must first get the approval of the body politically responsible for the consequences.