In Harris County, the landlord picks the judge
Before the eviction hearing, before the notice on the door, before the tenant even knows there’s a case, a landlord sits down and picks a judge. The choice is right there in a dropdown on efiletexas.gov:
In Harris County, the location of the eviction determines the Justice of the Peace precinct. Most counties in Texas have one court per precinct, but Harris County has two. An eviction case can go to either court. And there are no rules about which court hears a given case. So the decision is left up to the landlord.
For a long time, this didn’t really matter. The two judges in a precinct did about the same thing. Then Steve Duble was elected, and everything changed.
One courtroom emptied. The other filled up.
The two courts in Precinct 1 used to be pretty similar. Of the 11,000 eviction cases that went through the precinct in 2022, Place 1 handled about 4,600 and Place 2 handled about 6,300, if anything the busier of the two. Two years later, that had reversed completely: Place 1 handled nearly 9,800 cases, and Place 2 only about 1,100. Yet the total caseload barely moved, staying near 11,000 cases a year the whole time.
We can see exactly where this shift happened. In the beginning of 2023, the lines split, and they never crossed back. It’s not a coincidence that January 2023 is also when Steve Duble took the Place 2 bench.
Why Harris County landlords favor one court over another
Judge Duble spent thirty years as a lawyer representing both tenants and landlords, and he ran for JP on a basic idea: an eviction hearing should be more than a conveyor belt to a default judgment. But in Houston, that’s not as simple as it sounds.
First, Judge Duble obtained a $150,000 grant from the National Center for State Courts. He used that money to hire Loreta Kovacic as a court navigator. For every new eviction filing, she calls and texts the tenant to tell them that this is a real lawsuit, and that help exists.
When the tenant shows up to their hearing, the pace of the court slows down to make sure they understand the proceedings. There is mediation with volunteer lawyers who sit with both sides to look for a deal. If rent relief funds are available, the hearing can be postponed for a few days so payment can arrive before anyone is kicked out. Tenants can be paired with an attorney for free. And if a tenant can’t get downtown to the courthouse, remote hearings over Zoom are available.
Ultimately, the program did what Duble promised: it slowed the conveyor belt.
The clearest measure of defendant participation in civil court is the default judgment rate. A default judgment happens when a defendant doesn’t show up, and the plaintiff wins automatically. For a landlord, a default is a quick win.
A skeptic might say a default just means a tenant had no defense anyway. But defaults also include tenants who never learned there was a case to answer, because nobody told them the notice on the door was real. Kovacic’s outreach legitimizes the case and makes it clear that help is available. It also helps landlords seek out and receive rent relief.
Before Duble took the bench, the two Precinct 1 courts had nearly identical default rates around 30 percent. Once Duble’s court started calling tenants ahead of their hearing date, that rate fell every year.
For this work, Duble’s court won a national award, and the Texas Tribune, the Houston Landing, and Texas Monthly all wrote it up. If a landlord is seeking a fast eviction, why would they willingly choose the longer path?
Exploiting the lack of rules and random assignment
It’s clear that landlords are wise to the game. Royal Phoenician, an apartment complex on the southwest side, sent every one of its 202 eviction filings before 2023 to Place 2. After Duble won that bench, it only sent 5 percent of its 201 eviction filings to him. Camden, one of the largest apartment operators in the country, went from filing all of its Precinct 1 cases in Place 2 to almost none. This trend holds across many of the biggest landlords.
Then there’s small claims. These cases are filed mostly by ordinary people suing one another a single time, with no idea the precinct has two courts that run differently from one another. If the shift in evictions were some innocent anomaly, small claims should have shifted too. It didn’t. Small claims filings in Duble’s court were relatively steady the whole time.
Letting a plaintiff pick a judge is not a new problem. Other courts have already named the danger. In 2024 the federal judiciary moved to require random assignment for the cases most open to forum-picking, to bolster public confidence in the courts. Chief Justice Roberts had named the same danger in his 2021 report: assignment rules that let “the plaintiff … select a particular judge to hear a case.”
Texas has now said the same thing. In March, the Texas Supreme Court amended the Rules of Judicial Administration, requiring every county’s local rules to provide for “the random and fair distribution of cases… upon the initial filing of each case.” Compliance was required by July 1, 2026.
Yet there’s real debate over whether JP courts are bound by this rule at all. The Texas Justice Court Training Center’s general counsel has argued the new rule doesn’t force a county to balance caseloads across its justice precincts. They talk about how eviction is based on location, and it would cause an unnecessary travel burden on defendants in busy precincts to show up to court across the county. But they are silent about two courts in the same precinct.
Justices of the Peace are separately elected constitutional officers. Nobody has tested whether the Texas Supreme Court’s rules can bind them in this way. But even if the rule can’t force Harris County’s hand, the state’s own rulebook now calls this kind of gap unfair.
Roughly four thousand eviction cases a year were steered out of Duble’s court.
Apply the gap in default rates to that number, and it comes to about 1,500 households over three years who lost their case by default in the other court, when they would have shown up for the case in Duble’s court.
This isn’t just a Precinct 1 problem. None of Harris County’s eight precincts split their cases evenly between the two courts. Precinct 1 is simply the most lopsided, making the disparity even more visible.
What you can do about it
The simplest solution needs only two people. Precinct 1’s two judges could just agree to assign new cases at random, or to keep them where they land and share the diversion facilitator and mediation pool across both courtrooms.
A county-wide fix needs at least eleven people. The justice courts’ own local rules can be amended by a two-thirds vote of the sixteen judges who run them. Eleven votes could add a sentence to the rules declaring that all cases would be assigned between a precinct’s two courts at random.
The legislature could also propose fixes to require random assignment within a JP precinct statewide.
Harris County Commissioners Court decides how the budget gets allocated for these courts. They can decide to fund courts based on a range of performance measures related to justice administration, not case volume.
If you live in Harris County, you can call your commissioner. You can write a letter to your state representative. You can email your local JPs to ask whether they’ll agree to random assignment on their own.
Picture that same dropdown on efiletexas.gov a year from now. The landlord opens the filing form, gets to the courtroom field, and there’s nothing left to choose. The software already decided. Nobody has to trust the landlord’s judgment, or the county’s memory, or anyone’s goodwill to make it fair. It just is.
Unlike so many other challenges in Texas, this disparity is fixable.