Liberty Mutual Insurance Company v. Ricky Adcock

in which Justice JOHNSON, Justice WILLETT, Justice LEHRMANN, Justice BOYD, and Justice DEVINE joined.

A fundamental constraint on the courts’ role in statutory interpretation is that the Legislature enacts the laws of the state and the courts must find their intent in that language and not elsewhere. Under the guise of agency deference, an agency asks us to judicially engraft into the Texas Workers’ Compensation Act a statutory procedure to re-open determinations of eligibility for permanent lifetime income benefits — a procedure the Legislature deliberately removed in 1989. The Legislature’s…