Scott Brister Republican

Chief Justice, Fifteenth Court of Appeals

About this race: The Fifteenth Court of Appeals is new and it is statewide. Its own page (www.txcourts.gov/15thcoa) records that "The legislature created the Fifteenth Court of Appeals during its 88th Session in 2023", that it has "statewide civil intermediate appellate jurisdiction", and that it holds "exclusive intermediate appellate jurisdiction over matters arising out of or related to a civil appeals brought by or against the state or a board, commission, department, office, or other agency in the executive branch of the state government" as well as "exclusive jurisdiction over appeals from the Texas Business Courts". It began work on 2024-09-01 with three members, and the Texas Tribune’s guide to these races (www.texastribune.org/2026/10/02/texas-15th-court-of-appeals-2026-elections-guide) records that "All three of the court’s current members are Republicans who were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2024"; this is the first election for every seat on it. Why this Court is on a cannabis voter guide. Because every civil suit against a Texas state agency now goes through it, the live hemp litigation does too. The State’s interlocutory appeal from the Travis County temporary injunction against the health department’s consumable-hemp rules — Texas Hemp Business Council v. Texas Department of State Health Services, Cause No. D-1-GN-26-002511 — is No. 15-26-00099-CV in this court, the case number this site’s own Texas law record already cites, and the rules are being enforced while it is pending. ⚠️That is a fact about the Court, not a prediction about any candidate. This site does not know and does not say how any person here would rule, and Canon 5 is the reason none of them may say either. ⚠️And the docket itself was not read: the judiciary’s case search at search.txcourts.gov asks automated tools not to read it, so the filings and the argument setting are reported here only as far as sources that do permit us carry them. This Court has already decided cannabis cases, and this is exactly how much of them this site could read. The Supreme Court of Texas’s own order lists, read in full on 2026-10-16, record decisions of this court in the State’s suits against San Marcos, Austin and Elgin, which this site’s local-law record identifies as the suits over those cities’ voter-approved marijuana ordinances: No. 15-24-00084-CV (San Marcos), decided 2025-04-17 and reported at 714 S.W.3d 224, review denied 2025-09-12 (www.txcourts.gov/media/1461266/supreme-court-of-texas-orders-09-12-2025.pdf); No. 15-24-00077-CV (Austin), decided 2025-04-24 and reported at 714 S.W.3d 247, review denied 2025-12-19 (www.txcourts.gov/media/1461782/supreme-court-of-texas-orders-12-19-2025.pdf); and No. 15-24-00082-CV (Elgin), decided 2025-09-16, in which the Supreme Court on 2026-09-18 "vacates the judgment of the court of appeals and dismisses the case as moot" but "denies the Petitioner's request to vacate the court of appeals' opinion" (www.txcourts.gov/media/1463341/supreme-court-of-texas-orders-09-18-2026.pdf). Denying review is not a decision on the merits. ⚠️Which justices sat on those Appeals, and who wrote for the Court, is not established in this note. This court’s opinions are served by the judiciary at search.txcourts.gov, which asks automated tools not to read it; the Supreme Court’s order lists name the court and the case but not the panel; and law.justia.com, which permits automated readers on that path in its robots.txt, answered our request on 2026-10-16 with HTTP 403, which this site records and does not work around. So no opinion of this court is attributed here to any candidate, in either direction. ⚠️And none of it is a prediction: the hemp-rules appeal described above is a different case on a different question. The candidates’ silence here is required, not evasive. The Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 5(1)(i), says a judge or judicial candidate shall not "make pledges or promises of conduct in office regarding pending or impending cases, specific classes of cases, specific classes of litigants, or specific propositions of law that would suggest to a reasonable person that the judge is predisposed to a probable decision". Hemp and cannabis cases are exactly such a class of cases before this court, so this site does not read a judicial candidate’s silence the way it reads a legislator’s, and it does not send these candidates a questionnaire. (Texas Code of Judicial Conduct: www.txcourts.gov/media/1462935/texas-state-code-of-judicial-conduct.pdf)

Scott BristerRepublicanIncumbent

No record compiled yet. Nothing on cannabis — no vote, bill, statement or endorsement — was found in any source we could read. 4 limits on that search are recorded with it.

What was checked for Scott Brister, and the limits on it

Checked on 2026-10-12: confirmed as a certified candidate in the Secretary of State’s final ballot certification of 28 August 2026, which is where the name and party on this card come from.

⚠️What could not be read, and is therefore not claimed here. The Texas judiciary’s own opinion and docket search at search.txcourts.gov asks automated tools not to read it, and this site did not read it, so no claim is made about the full body of this candidate’s written opinions. Ballotpedia permits us in its robots.txt but served no page content to any request on 2026-10-12, so NO Ballotpedia profile was read for this candidate and none is cited.

⚠️And this card does not tell you whether this candidate held a seat in an earlier Legislature, but the question is now narrower. Read on 2026-10-15, from each chamber’s own journal: the roll of members-elect that the Texas House Journal prints, district by district, on the first day of every regular session from the 75th Legislature (1997) through the 89th (2025), and every senator the Texas Senate Journal names with a district on the first day of every regular session from the 76th (1999) through the 89th.

For the 89th those are journals.house.texas.gov/hjrnl/89r/pdf/89RDAY01FINAL.PDF and journals.senate.texas.gov/SJRNL/89R/HTML/89RSJ01-14-F.HTM and every journal read is listed on this site’s corrections page. No one by this candidate’s name appears in any of them. That is narrower than a negative answer. Those rolls name the members seated as each session opened, and in most years the Senate’s names the senators who were not up for election by surname alone, so a member who sat only in earlier sessions, who arrived at a special election and was never named in full on a later first day, or who served under another name would not be found this way.

If this candidate is one of those, there may be a cannabis voting record this site is missing.

⚠️"NO RECORD" on this card means no campaign statement and no opinion of his that this site has read. He presides over the court that is hearing the hemp-rules appeal described in the race note above, and that is a fact about the court, not a record of his. His own court’s opinions are indexed only at search.txcourts.gov, which asks automated tools not to read it, so this site has read none of them and makes no claim about what they contain.

⚠️Whether this candidate has a campaign site of their own is an open question here, and not a negative answer. This guide has not found one. It no longer claims to have looked in a way that could settle it, because the method this card used to cite was put to a case it was known to have passed and came back just as empty there. So if this candidate publishes a platform of their own, this guide may simply not have reached it, and the absence of a cannabis position below is weaker evidence than it looks.

This card has been corrected. What an earlier version of it said, and what was wrong with it, is published in the corrections log.

No score: this candidate has no recorded vote or bill authorship on a cannabis measure. Silence is not a position, so nothing is inferred from it.

Campaign sites and voter guides checked for Scott Brister

Pages read in full:

www.txcourts.gov/15thcoa/about-the-court — sections on the page: The Fifteenth Court of Appeals’s own page naming its three members and their places, read in full by us on 2026-10-12. It records that "Chief Justice Scott Brister was appointed by Governor Abbott as the first Chief Justice of the Fifteenth Court of Appeals effective September 1, 2024" and lists him at Place 1. The page carries no occurrence, on a word boundary, of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8, delta-9, cannabinoid, dispensary or Compassionate Use.
www.texastribune.org/2026/10/02/texas-15th-court-of-appeals-2026-elections-guide — sections on the page: The Texas Tribune’s 2026 general-election guide to this court, by Paul Cobler and María Méndez, published 2026-10-02 and read in full by us on 2026-10-12. It names him as the Republican candidate for Chief Justice and as the sitting Chief Justice. No sentence about him in it contains, on a word boundary, cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8, delta-9, cannabinoid, dispensary or Compassionate Use.

See the whole Chief Justice, Fifteenth Court of Appeals race, including every opponent →

Who is paying for this campaign

Campaign finance — Texas Ethics Commission

We could not match a Commission filer number to this name. The Commission’s list of candidates who have appointed a campaign treasurer carried no single row matching both the surname and the given name on the ballot for this seat, so none was guessed at. Scott Brister may have filed under a different form of their name.

Why there are no figures and no industry breakdown here. Texas does not require a candidate to report a contributor’s employer or occupation — the Commission’s own 2026 guide asks for the amount, the contributor’s name and address, and the date, and that is all. So there is nothing in these filings to group into industries, and we have built no such grouping rather than imply one. Separately, the Commission’s bulk filing archive tells automated readers to stay out of it, and we honour that, so we have read no individual Texas contribution record. Treat the itemised question as unchecked by us, not as checked and found empty.

Search campaign filings at the Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) → — choose Transaction Type “Contributions” and search by name.

Any grouping of contributors into an industry is weedvoter’s own classification, applied to employer and committee names exactly as filed. The Commission publishes employers and committees; it never publishes industries. OpenSecrets discontinued its public interface in April 2025, so nothing here is an OpenSecrets classification.

Money received is not a position. Everything on this card is money that changed hands. It is not evidence that any contribution influenced any decision, nothing on it is placed beside a roll call, and we make no claim about anyone’s motive. For what Scott Brister has actually done about cannabis, read the record above on this page — the roll calls, the bills that carry their name, and the date of each one, every entry linked to the document it came from. That is the part of this page built to be judged, and it is the part the score is calculated from. No contribution on this card moves that score by a cent.