§ 90.012.Supreme Court Rulemaking

A conditional grant of rulemaking authority, and the condition is the whole of it.

The supreme court may promulgate amendments to the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure regarding the joinder of claimants in asbestos-related or silica-related actions if the rules are consistent with the chapter’s joinder provision.

That provision restricts joinder sharply, requiring in substance that claims not be tried together unless the claimants share a common exposure history — and the reason is the practice it was enacted to end.

Consolidated asbestos trials joined hundreds of claimants at once, mixing the gravely ill with the barely symptomatic and the heavily exposed with the marginal. The pressure such a trial exerts on defendants comes from its scale rather than from the merits of any individual claim.

So the section is a lock, not a grant. The supreme court already has rulemaking authority over civil procedure. What this adds is a condition: rules on this narrow subject must be consistent with the statutory restriction.

It reflects the same legislative-judicial tension that appears in the class action chapter, where the Legislature likewise directed the content of rules the court promulgates.

The grant is confined to joinder in these two categories of action, so it says nothing about the court’s authority over the rest of the procedure governing them.

The multidistrict litigation provision handles these cases at scale by a different route — pretrial consolidation before one court, with trials remaining separate — which is the mechanism the chapter leaves intact.