Judge Alvarez Reprimanded After 19 Reversed Rulings

A Missed Deadline and an Unheard Party

In a custody case known as the E.R.S. matter, Alvarez sua sponte disqualified an attorney, Kate Soulsby, from the case after a dispute over subpoenaed medical records, and barred her from even communicating with the client’s future counsel. Soulsby took the ruling to the Fourth Court of Appeals, which granted mandamus relief, finding the record did not support disqualification as a remedy, and ordered Alvarez to vacate her ruling within ten days. Alvarez missed that deadline by about a month, later telling the Commission that her court’s general counsel had not informed her of the order in time. A regional presiding judge later found Alvarez had also exceeded the scope of the appellate court’s mandate by resetting the underlying sanctions motion for submission rather than a hearing, and partially granted a recusal motion against her. When a different judge finally heard the re-urged sanctions motion, she denied it outright, the opposite of where Alvarez’s own rulings had been heading, and ordered the opposing side’s fees paid instead.

In a separate custody trial in the same court, the Lindner matter, Alvarez modified a party’s visitation from supervised to unsupervised mid-trial, after hearing only the opposing side’s witnesses and without hearing the affected party or her attorney’s objections. The Commission found this denied that party the right to be heard on the issue, a due-process protection every litigant is owed under Canon 3B(8) of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, regardless of how minor the judge may have considered the change.

Nineteen Reversals Over Child Welfare Cases

The largest share of the Commission’s findings concerned Alvarez’s rulings against the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, the state agency that manages the foster care system. A Texas appellate justice, Patricia O’Connell Alvarez of the Fourth Court of Appeals, took the unusual step of formally reporting Alvarez to the Commission, saying Alvarez had continuously disregarded binding precedent and interfered with the powers of a co-equal branch of government. An anonymous complaint made similar allegations.

The numbers back up the concern. Of Alvarez’s rulings involving the Department, nineteen were appealed, and in all nineteen the Fourth Court of Appeals reversed at least part of her decision. The pattern started on June 1, 2022, when the appellate court found she had ordered the Department to sign a child-specific placement contract at a set daily rate, a remedy the court said violated the Texas Constitution’s separation of powers clause because it is not a judge’s role to direct how an executive agency spends money or runs its programs. That single ruling became the basis for thirteen more reversals in similar cases from Alvarez’s court, six of which she issued after the first reversal had already been published, including one case where she acknowledged on the record, by name, that she was familiar with the earlier appellate opinion and ordered the Department to make the same kind of payments anyway.

Twice more the appellate court found Alvarez had crossed the same line by ordering the removal or discipline of specific Department caseworkers, writing in one opinion that she had, in the court’s words, stepped out of her judicial role and into the position of directing the Department’s own operations. In a 2024 case, the court found she had acted as an advocate for a child rather than a neutral judge, after she excluded the Department from a chambers conference the appellate court had specifically said the Department could attend, then held an additional, unauthorized hearing where she overruled the Department’s objections and ordered it to draft findings in her favor. Court records show she also failed to comply with the appellate court’s own deadlines in seven of the nineteen cases, a roughly one-in-three failure rate.

In her response, Alvarez said she had not sought out additional education on the separation-of-powers issue after the first reversals because she believed the appellate opinions themselves addressed it, and that she had since begun a routine of reviewing the appellate court’s weekly rulings herself, with help from a friend who practices appellate law, to avoid repeating the pattern.

The Discipline Ladder (Texas)

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct issues sanctions, in order of severity, as admonitions, warnings, reprimands, and censures, either privately (confidential) or publicly (on the record). A public reprimand, the sanction here, is the same public tier as File 29’s much narrower case, a reminder that Texas’s ladder groups cases by category rather than by scale: a single bad summons and a documented, multi-year pattern across nineteen reversed rulings can land on the same rung. Removal and involuntary suspension are a different track entirely, requiring a separate Review Tribunal or the Texas Supreme Court.

A Pattern Against One Attorney

The Commission’s third thread involved Diane Martinez, a family law attorney who regularly worked as a court-appointed amicus attorney representing children’s interests in Bexar County. The Commission found that Alvarez adopted a blanket policy of refusing to appoint Martinez in any case in her court and, on at least two occasions, told other attorneys in open court that she would not sign an order appointing her, despite the parties’ own agreement to do so.

The pattern showed up repeatedly in Alvarez’s own docket notes and courtroom comments. In one hearing, after learning Martinez had not been properly notified of her own appointment as amicus and so had done no work on a case, Alvarez remarked that she was shocked, asked aloud whether Martinez had done any work in five months, and later wrote in her docket notes that the amicus attorney had failed to appear. In another hearing, when the same notification problem happened again, Alvarez granted a reset but noted in the file that it was due in part to the lack of an amicus appearance. At a third hearing, after learning Martinez was out of the country on approved leave, Alvarez told the courtroom she wished she had known while practicing law that she could practice by proxy the way Martinez appeared to be doing, drawing laughter from those present, according to the record.

Martinez eventually filed her own motion to recuse Alvarez in a separate case; a regional presiding judge granted it and reassigned the case. Separately, when a juror in a different judge’s courtroom mentioned recognizing Martinez and said he would be biased because of it, Alvarez arranged for a transcript of that jury selection, at a cost of $712.50, to use as evidence in her own defense before the Commission. She initially did not disclose to the Commission that Bexar County, rather than she personally, had paid for that transcript and two others used the same way; when the omission came out, she said she would repay the funds.

The Rules She Broke

How It Played in the Press

This one reached well beyond the usual disciplinary roundups. Texas Public Radio covered the reprimand in depth, tying it to broader tensions between Bexar County family courts and the Department of Family and Protective Services. Fox San Antonio and KSAT also covered it, both carrying Alvarez’s own public statement that she believed the underlying allegations were unfounded but respected the Commission’s decision, and that she would continue ruling in what she considers the best interest of children before her court, including children in foster care.

Where Is She Now?

Alvarez remains the sitting judge of the 45th District Court. She ran for a third term in 2026, defeated a Democratic primary challenger in March, and drew no Republican opponent for the November general election, effectively securing another four-year term beginning January 1, 2027.

Sources

PRIMARY SOURCE

• State Commission on Judicial Conduct, Public Reprimand, In the Matter of the Hon. Mary Lou Alvarez, CJC Nos. 22-1347, 24-0448, 24-0508 and 24-0625, issued May 12, 2025. scjc.texas.gov

NEWS COVERAGE

• Texas Public Radio: Bexar County state district judge reprimanded by judicial commission. tpr.org
• Fox San Antonio: Texas judge reprimanded by state commission for judicial conduct. foxsanantonio.com
• KSAT: State Commission of Judicial Conduct reprimands Bexar County judge Mary Lou Alvarez. ksat.com

REFERENCE

• State Commission on Judicial Conduct: Public Sanctions, Fiscal Year 2025. scjc.texas.gov
• Texas Bar Journal (July/August 2025): Disciplinary Actions, State Bar of Texas. texasbar.com
• Ballotpedia: Mary Lou Alvarez. ballotpedia.org

This post summarizes public judicial-discipline records and news reporting for general informational purposes. It is not legal advice.