Briefing Nearly Completed in Chicas
The Texas Supreme Court should soon decide whether to accept review of a workers’ comp case that involves principles that are important to the way that Texas comp cases are handled at the administrative level and on judicial review. The case, Chicas v. Texas Mutual Insurance Company, is pending on petition for review. This means that the court has not (yet) agreed to hear the case. However, the case is expected to be fully briefed by the parties on June 22, 2018, after which the Court will consider whether to hear and decide the case.
The issue in Chicas is whether the deadline to file suit for judicial review in a workers’ compensation case is a jurisdictional deadline or a statute of limitations. The intermediate courts of appeals are divided in their approach to the question. Most of these courts have concluded that the issue is one of jurisdiction. But one earlier decision decided otherwise, reasoning that the defense is one of limitations. The Chicas court agreed with this earlier decision.
Both lines of cases rely upon the reasoning of a 17-year-old, non-WC case, called Dubai Petroleum Co. v. Kazi. In Dubai, the Texas Supreme Court partially overruled a very old (1926) case, Mingus v. Wadley, which was a workers’ compensation case. Mingus has been cited for decades for the proposition that the failure of a party to satisfy a statutory prerequisite, such as timely filing a suit for judicial review, is a jurisdictional defect that could be raised at any stage of the proceedings.
Jurisdictional arguments can be raised by a party at any stage of the proceedings (even, for the first time, on appeal). They may be challenged through the extraordinary writ of a petition for writ of mandamus. Defenses based on the statute of limitations must be raised in the pleadings and decided based on a motion for summary judgment.
The court of appeals in Chicas wrote:
Texas Mutual contends that the 45-day deadline for seeking judicial review set forth in section 410.252(a) is jurisdictional. The trial court agreed and granted Texas Mutual’s plea to the jurisdiction. In her sole issue on appeal, Bertila contends “[t]he trial court erred in dismissing [her] judicial review claims because the 45-day deadline was tolled while the claims were pending in probate court.” Texas Mutual responds that, because the 45-day deadline is jurisdictional, it cannot be tolled by section 16.064 of the Civil Practices and Remedies Code.
Bertila’s present suit was admittedly filed more than 45 days after the DWC’s decision became final; but, if the 45-day deadline is not jurisdictional and was tolled while her judicial review claims were pending in probate court, then her suit for judicial review would be timely. Thus, the issue presented to this Court is whether the 45-day deadline for filing claims for judicial review of a final DWC decision is a jurisdictional, statutory prerequisite to asserting those claims in district court.
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[I]n 2000, the Texas Supreme Court overruled prior authority, which had held that the failure to comply with statutory prerequisites was always jurisdictional. See Dubai Petroleum Co. v. Kazi, 12 S.W.3d 71, 76 (Tex. 2000) (overruling Mingus v. Wadley, 285 S.W. 1084, 1087 (Tex. 1926)). In Kazi, the Supreme Court considered the jurisdictional nature of a statutory requirement that, in wrongful death suits involving the death of a citizen in a foreign county, the foreign county have “equal treaty rights” with the United States. Id. at 73–74. The supreme court noted that classifying a matter as jurisdictional “opens the way to making judgments vulnerable to delayed attack for a variety of irregularities that perhaps better ought to be sealed in a judgment[,]” and overruled prior case law to the contrary “to the extent that it characterized the plaintiff’s failure to establish a statutory prerequisite as jurisdictional. Id. at 76. Instead, “[t]he right of a plaintiff to maintain a suit, while frequently treated as going to the question of jurisdiction, has been said to go in reality to the right of the plaintiff to relief rather than to the jurisdiction of the court to afford it.” Id. at 76–77.
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After considering (1) the statutory language, (2) the statute’s purpose, (3) the consequences of each interpretation, and (4) whether the statute defines, enlarges, or restricts the class of causes the trial court may decide or the relief that it may award, we conclude that, while the 45-day deadline for filing judicial review claims is mandatory, it is not jurisdictional.
CONCLUSION
Texas Mutual’s plea to the jurisdiction is entirely premised on the assumption that the tolling provision found in section 16.064 does not apply to statutory prerequisites that are jurisdictional, and that the 45-day deadline for filing judicial review claims is jurisdictional. However, we hold that the 45-day deadline for filing judicial review claims found in section 410.252(a) of the Labor Code is not jurisdictional. Therefore, the trial court erred in granting Texas Mutual’s plea to the jurisdiction.
Review by the Texas Supreme Court is largely discretionary. This means that the court does not have to hear most appeals and, in fact, does not hear most cases that are presented to it for review. If the court shows interest in Chicas, the next step would be for the court to grant the petition for review and set the case for oral argument. That decision could be forthcoming relatively quickly, even as soon as within a matter of weeks.
FOLIO
