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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — An appointee of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wiped away tears and gave an emotional defense of her credentials after a tense exchange over diversity hiring policies, which was later followed by the state’s top Republicans rushing to support her publicly.

Texas Water Board Development Chair L’Oreal Stepney, who is Black, was consoled at one point by lawmakers after the exchange Thursday with GOP state Rep. Brian Harrison, who questioned her and other agency officials over their hiring practices.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, who are all Republicans, later issued statements of support for Stepney and her service, while other GOP lawmakers criticized Harrison over the exchange.

“While passionate and open discussion will always be welcomed, comments that demean and belittle will never be tolerated,” Republican state Rep. Greg Bonnen, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, posted on X.

Harrison is an outspoken critic of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in state government. He questioned Stepney and Edna Jackson, who is also Black, over a line in the agency’s strategic plan that its workforce should reflect the state’s growing diversity.

Harrison did not directly question the credentials of Stepney or any other agency workers during the hearing.

On Friday, he defended his questioning during the hearing.

“My line of questioning was perfect and professional,” said Harrison, adding that he had posed similar questions to dozens of other agency heads. “It was Democrats on the committee who raised the issue of her qualifications. I never said a word about it.”

Harrison’s line of questioning prompted Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier, who is Black, to express her outrage at having “to watch two Black women have to defend 246 years of systemic racism.”

Stepney then delivered an emotional defense of her credentials to the panel. She said March would mark 33 years working for the state and listed off her two engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, one in aerospace engineering and the other in civil engineering.

“It was a deep honor for me to be appointed to the board, to be confirmed by the board, and to be appointed chair,” she said. “I have always been grateful to the governor. What have I done? I have protected the drinking water supply of 31 million Texans.”

DALLAS – D Magazine reports that in a statement shared with press just before 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Saks Global reiterated that it still plans to close the downtown Dallas Neiman Marcus store at the end of March, calling any claims to the contrary “misleading.” That comes despite an announcement from Dallas leaders yesterday that the slice of land at the center of a ground lease snafu would be donated to the city. Saks initially said it would leave downtown after “a landlord” terminated Neiman Marcus’ occupancy. In today’s statement, Saks Global confirmed the landlord’s identity as Slaughter Partners.

“From as early as 2011 and as recently as December 2024, there have been several attempts to come to a commercially reasonable agreement with one of the Downtown store landlords, Slaughter Partners (Slaughter),” the statement reads. “In November 2024, previous NMG leadership contacted the City of Dallas requesting assistance in the lease negotiations, during which city officials expressed concern about the store and its continued operation. Before this meeting, previous NMG leadership also discussed purchasing a portion of the land with Slaughter’s broker; however, Slaughter would not offer a price. Despite these efforts and engaging the city, all attempts to come to a commercially reasonable agreement were rejected by Slaughter, who terminated Neiman Marcus’ occupancy upon expiration of the lease.” Saks also says it hasn’t received any documentation regarding the agreement between Slaughter and the city and feels it is unclear how the new agreement would affect the property and its other owners. The company alleges that the whole thing only became an option “after Slaughter’s attempts to increase rent were unsuccessful.” Slaughter, Saks says, continued to demand above-market rate rents. “Saks Global inherited this lease issue from Neiman Marcus’ previous owners and worked in good faith to come to an agreement with the landlord,” Saks Global Properties CEO Ian Putnam said. The company acknowledges the city leaders’ desire to keep the store open and is willing to hear them out, but it ultimately needs to make decisions based on “what’s best for the future and our long-term success.”

AUSTIN – The Dallas Morning News reports that the Texas Senate on Thursday passed a bill to ban the use of courier services that facilitate the sale of Texas Lottery tickets. Senate Bill 28 by Republican Sen. Bob Hall of Edgewood was approved 31-0 amid concerns that couriers have hurt the lottery’s reputation. Courier services take orders online or through an app, buy lottery tickets from a retailer and send a scanned copy to the buyer, holding the ticket until the drawing is held. Couriers charge a fee to buy and manage the tickets, according to the Lottery Commission. The legislation next goes to the House, where state Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Prosper, has a companion bill. Shaheen also has a bill to abolish the lottery.

Speaking Thursday to the Senate, Hall said the Lottery Commission “created loopholes specifically to allow the use of telephone and internet group purchases, resulting in underage gambling and other changes to open the door wide for what the Legislature intended to be illegal gambling practices.” “This bill is intended to send a strong message, not just to the Lottery Commission, but to all state agencies … that have taken it upon themselves to defy legislation and create rules that clearly violate the word and the intent of legislation,” Hall said as he introduced his proposal. “SB 28 will not restore integrity to the Texas lottery. I don’t even know if that’s possible. But it will reiterate the responsibility we have given the commission to ensure lottery couriers and their licensed retail outlets are no longer able to operate in the state in language even they should be able to understand,” he said. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick hailed the unanimous vote as a step in protecting the lottery’s integrity, saying Texans must have “faith the game is not rigged.” “Today, the Senate made it clear that the first step in restoring public trust in the commission, if even possible, is to ban lottery couriers. The decision on whether the lottery will continue will be made in the coming days and weeks of the legislative session,” he said in a statement. The Coalition of Texas Lottery Couriers lamented passage of the bill. “We are disappointed that a pro-business state like Texas would consider shutting down companies that have for years followed the guidance and instruction of the Texas Lottery and honored the trust of millions of Texas customers,” the group said in a statement.

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — An 1842 U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the kidnapping conviction of a white man who seized a Black family and forced them into slavery south of the Mason-Dixon line is still being cited in American jurisprudence, 160 years after enslaved people throughout the U.S. were freed.

Prigg v. Pennsylvania has been cited in 274 other rulings since then, according to the Citing Slavery Project at Michigan State University. They are among more than 7,000 direct citations of slavery-law precedents that continue to guide lawyers and judges, said the project’s director, law professor Justin Simard.

This research into the lasting impact of legal principles related to the ownership of other humans is a counterpoint to efforts by the Trump administration and elected officials in Republican-led states to remove references to America’s racial history and dictate what teachers can discuss in classrooms.

“Because people are invested in trying to pretend that our history of slavery didn’t happen and that its effects are not still with us,” Simard told The Associated Press, “I thought, what better way to prove that slavery had an influence on our legal system than using official legal sources?”
Citations show American jurisprudence is founded on slavery

Most of the slavery precedents concern how property rights were protected by the U.S. Constitution, which was written by wealthy property owners in an era when much of the young nation’s economy was powered by the buying and selling and sweat of enslaved people.

The Supreme Court made slavery’s importance to the America’s founding clear when it ruled that Pennsylvania’s anti-slavery law was an unconstitutional affront to the federal Fugitive Slave Act, and ruled in favor of Edward Prigg, who had forced Margaret Morgan and her children into slavery in Maryland.

The U.S. Constitution clearly granted “to the citizens of the slaveholding states the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves, as property, in every state in the Union, into which they might escape from the state where they were held in servitude,” the court wrote.

The slaveowner’s right to “this species of property” was so fundamental to the framers of the Constitution that without it, “the Union could not have been formed,” the justices added.

Slavery became illegal when the 13th Amendment was adopted in 1865, but Prigg has been most often cited in the decades thereafter, mostly in cases involving property law, as guidance regarding the boundaries between state and federal power, Simard said.
How rulings are still shaped by slavery laws

The continuing use of such citations shows that slavery wasn’t just a historic stain that the 13th Amendment cleaned up — these precedents have an insidious effect on jurisprudence even today, said Leonard Mungo, a Michigan-based civil rights and employment discrimination attorney.

“The unashamed use of human beings as property and as the foundation for the development of jurisprudence regarding property law is the same reason courts across this country rarely find violations of civil rights in employment and other contexts in its rulings and decisions,” Mungo said.

And it’s not like only minorities are affected: Prigg was cited in a 1989 Supreme Court decision overruling most of the $850,000 judgment awarded by a Texas jury to a white football coach who alleged that he was reassigned and demoted from a mostly Black high school because of his race.

Sometimes, slavery precedents are invoked in efforts to reaffirm civil rights. In a 2016 Iowa Supreme Court opinion, dissenting justices said people arrested but not yet formally charged with a crime must be allowed private in-person attorney consultations. Citing how Fugitive Slave Act enforcement shaped the Iowa Constitution, these justices said enslaved people were given the right of counsel — and so should an Iowa man accused of driving under the influence. They were outvoted, 4-3.
‘Digging and digging’

Simard was doing research for his dissertation when he began compiling evidence that northern judges had cited slave cases in the 19th century. He discovered that these citations were more numerous, widespread and recent than he imagined.

“I kept digging and digging and digging and realizing that this wasn’t something just one judge did or some very racist judge or something,” Simard said. “This was just a basic feature of the legal system and it really shocked me, really surprised me.”

More than 12,000 slavery rulings have been identified to date by Simard’s team, which then searches for citations.

And yet many lawyers and judges are either unaware of these origins or don’t think it matters that enslaved humans were the property in question, and consider them “just like regular law,” Simard said. “Not only are we ratifying their treatment as property in the past but also continuing to treat them as property in the present.”
Noting how to move forward

Simard’s team successfully lobbied the editors of The Bluebook, a guide to citations used by the legal profession, to require case notations such as “enslaved party” or “enslaved person at issue.”

“I think just eliminating these cases is impossible,” Simard said. “I think the best approach that lawyers and judges can take is to be thoughtful when they find these cases and cite these cases and to consider whether the law that these cases stand for is still good or not.”

Dylan Penningroth, a professor of law and history at the University of California-Berkeley, agreed.

“These slavery cases are everywhere,” Penningroth said. “How are we ever going to get them all off the book? One answer is you don’t really have to. If lawyers stop relying on these cases, they lose their power.”

Identifying those cases should keep their origins and intents on the minds of judges and litigators, according to Michigan Appeals Court Judge Adrienne Young. She said, “the real harm is in failing to acknowledge the horrific history.”