Texas did experience a Democratic wave Tuesday; you just might have missed it. And it could change the state in ways that the governor’s office on down could never dream of.

We are talking about the state’s most powerful and influential appellate courts that voters put into Democratic hands on Election Night.

In the Dallas-based 5th District Court of Appeals, the election swept eight Democrats onto the 13-seat bench. This was a court that was entirely Republican. Across Texas, the wave delivered appellate courts in Houston and Austin to Democratic majorities, giving Democrats control of the most influential courts of the state’s 14 appeals courts.

If Democrats have not yet noticed this, they should. It’s cause for them to celebrate the turnover on courts that will almost certainly give the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court much more work to do reviewing lower court decisions. The new courts are all but assured to be the more active sort of judiciary that the left always appreciates and the right wishes would just put down the gavel.

But put aside partisanship for a moment and consider the scope of this sea change. People with decades of appellate judicial experience and institutional memory will be packing away their robes to be replaced by lawyers who, in some cases, have never sat on any bench or written an appellate brief.

A prime example is Democrat Robbie Partida-Kipness, who ousted incumbent David Evans. Partida-Kipness has no judicial experience, has taken a case to jury trial in only a handful of instances and has never written an appellate brief. Several other of her newly elected colleagues have similar experience gaps, some glaring.

It’s not that newcomers can’t learn on the job. Our concern is that the court has gone from a depth of expertise to a majority of neophytes overnight. Even in the best circumstances, the learning curve is steep. Lawyers generally find it challenging to transition from advocate or prosecutor to trial judge, and even more challenging to be thrust into the complex issues of constitutional law and appellate reviews, something most lawyers never touch in a legal lifetime.

Nor is this a panel of limited jurisdiction with a light workload. The 5th District Court of Appeals is the busiest appellate court in Texas, responsible for reviewing civil and criminal appeals from trial courts in Dallas, Collin, Grayson, Hunt, Rockwall and Kaufman counties. Its rulings also shape the law on fundamental issues: jury verdicts; interpretation of contracts; summary judgment rulings and arbitration. In such reviews, strict conservative or more liberal interpretations matter. Most cases don’t make it to the Texas Supreme Court, effectively making the appeals courts the last stop for many Texans.

Democrats, who had been shut out of a seat on the appeals court since 1992, have contended that the court consistently leaned too far right, favored institutional interests and lacked dissenting voices.

Now, thanks to the unsung blue judicial wave, they will get their chance to add their stamp to the state’s governance. What that will mean from jurists who are just now taking the bench, we do not know. We will find out together as Texans what black robes in blue hands really mean.

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