Many of you may have heard that the Attorney General issued an opinion that court clerks may reject filings from the common law courts from the “Republic of Texas.” I welcomed the opinion perhaps more enthusiastically than the average person, having been a target of such filings, as well as a federal lawsuit seeking five million dollars punative damage for having tried a case in which a driver received a traffic ticket for failing to wear a seatbelt.

As luck would have it, my house was for sale at the time. A buyer offered the asking price in cash. I accepted it, and held my breath while the title company did the title work. Luckily, no bogus judgment surfaced, and the sale went through without a hitch. Judge Barefoot Sanders, (now my hero) dismissed the federal lawsuit on his own motion, declaring the lawsuit to be frivolous. Credit card companies continue to offer to lend me more money than I could ever repay, and my life goes on.

But there were times when I wondered what I would do if a “common law court judgment” was filed. Advocates of the so-called “Republic of Texas” movement have gotten various persons to conduct meaningless trials in “common-law courts” and have attempted to file judgments and other documents, including pleadings, rendered in these “courts” at county courthouses across Texas.

I was among those who sighed with relief when Attorney General Dan Morales opined that “a district or county clerk should not accept for filing any document that indicates on its face that it is to be filed, that is an order or judgment from, or that it is a notice of a removal petition to, any purported state or local court not named in the constitution or statutes of the state of Texas.”