{"id":6590,"date":"2026-07-13T08:01:53","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T08:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/?p=6590"},"modified":"2026-07-13T08:01:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T08:01:56","slug":"dallas-county-judge-pay-lawsuit-can-commissioners-use-supplements-to-punish-judges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/dallas-county-judge-pay-lawsuit-can-commissioners-use-supplements-to-punish-judges\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas County Judge Pay Lawsuit: Can Commissioners Use Supplements to Punish Judges?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dallas County commissioners passed a fiscal year 2026 budget in September 2025 giving every state district judge in the county a $25,000 pay supplement, every one except Amber Givens of the 282nd District Court. Within a week she sued, the county backed down inside a month and the whole episode left an awkward legal question in the middle of the courthouse: whether an elected commissioners court can withhold a discretionary supplement as informal discipline against a judge it dislikes and whether Texas law<\/a> even permits the distinction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Judge, the Supplement and the Amendment That Named Her<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Texas allows counties to top up district judge’s state salaries with a supplement of up to $25,000 a year, an amount the Legislature raised from $18,000 effective September 1, 2025, in the same session it lifted the base salary for state judges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dallas County’s approved supplement for FY2026 totaled roughly $500,000 across the county’s district judges and at the September 9 budget hearing County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins moved an amendment that awarded the full $25,000 to every district judge in the county with one exception<\/a>, reading Givens’s name into the record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Givens filed suit within the week, arguing the exclusion violated the section of the Texas Government Code that entitles all district judges in a county to equal supplemental compensation. Her attorney’s public position was blunt, the county’s action was “discriminatory, arbitrary and in direct violation of state law.<\/a>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The county’s defense at the meeting had been that supplemental pay is discretionary and therefore selectable; the code section says the opposite once the county has decided to pay at all and the county’s own assistant administrator warned commissioners on the record that unequal treatment among district judges would trigger equal-supplement obligations to county court-at-law judges as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Made Givens the Named Exception<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The context nobody at the hearing pretended wasn’t there: Givens had been publicly admonished by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2023 for sentencing a man to jail and revoking another’s bond in cases she had already been recused from, orders she has said resulted from an out-of-date electronic docket and which the sanctioning order faulted her for anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A separate Texas Rangers investigation into her court and it’s coordinator ended in 2023 when the Kaufman County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges<\/a> and more than 100 recusal motions had been filed against her over a short stretch, an unusually high number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the Statute Says and What the County Did<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"What<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Read against the Texas judicial salary schedule<\/a>, the mismatch is direct. Texas Government Code Section 659.012 sets a county-supplement ceiling of $25,000 per district judge, but the operative word is uniform<\/em> the code does not authorize commissioners to sort judges into “worthy” and “unworthy” categories once a supplement has been approved for the office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The statute treats the supplement as attached to the position, not to the officeholder’s performance and the state’s whole judicial-pay framework depends on that fixed logic; the Legislature ties county-court-at-law salaries, district judge minimums and even reduction formulas to the district-judge supplement being paid uniformly, which is why the county’s own administrator flagged the ripple effects during the September 9 meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The performance concern isn’t invented, Commissioner John Wiley Price named nine other district judges at the same hearing he says he would also have voted against, citing attendance and job performance and the underlying frustration with the local docket predates Givens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rub is that Texas already has a mechanism for judicial discipline, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct<\/a>, which had in fact publicly admonished Givens in 2023 through the exact process the constitution provides. A commissioners court is not that body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Withholding a supplement to signal displeasure blurs an accountability line the state deliberately drew and the county’s assistant administrator’s warning about cascading effects on county court-at-law pay reads, in retrospect, less like procedural caution and more like a preview of the legal problem the amendment created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Vote That Ended the Case Without Ending the Question<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Commissioners revisited the budget on October 7 and voted to add Givens’s $25,000 back in, the amendment barely passing<\/a>, Price voted no a second time, Jenkins abstained. Givens got the pay, the county mooted the lawsuit before any court ruled on the merits and the legal question the case raised, whether a commissioners court can lawfully single out a district judge for supplement exclusion, never received a decision that would bind the next commissioners court to try it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That absence matters. Nothing in the October reversal establishes precedent and nothing in the record forecloses a future budget vote structured the same way against a different judge. The uniformity requirement in Section 659.012 remains what it was before the amendment, before the lawsuit and before the reversal, a statute the county appeared to violate for 28 days, quietly corrected and left otherwise untested. The next judge to draw commissioner ire in a Texas county with $500,000 sitting in the supplement line will find out whether the calculus holds when the target actually fights it to a ruling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dallas County commissioners passed a fiscal year 2026 budget in September 2025 giving every state district judge in the county a $25,000 pay supplement, every one except Amber Givens of the 282nd District Court. Within a week she sued, the county backed down inside a month and the whole episode left an awkward legal question in the middle of the courthouse: whether an elected commissioners court can withhold a discretionary supplement as informal discipline against a judge it dislikes and whether Texas law even permits the distinction. The Judge, the Supplement and the Amendment That Named Her Texas allows counties<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":6592,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2791],"tags":[2841,2840,2843,2836,2837,2835,2838,2842,2839],"class_list":["post-6590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civil-law","tag-282nd-district-court","tag-amber-givens-lawsuit","tag-clay-lewis-jenkins","tag-county-judicial-compensation","tag-dallas-county-commissioners-court","tag-district-judge-pay-texas","tag-state-commission-on-judicial-conduct","tag-texas-government-code-659-012","tag-texas-judicial-supplement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6590"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6595,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6590\/revisions\/6595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}