Nick Bacarisse

Nick Bacarisse has briefed legal issues of broad public importance at every level of Texas and federal courts. Nick was the primary drafter of the appellate briefs leading to the Supreme Court of Texas’s landmark holding that Texas’s electric grid operator shared the State’s sovereign immunity. More recently, Nick successfully argued before the Supreme Court of Texas in a case upholding the grid operator’s and the Public Utility Commission’s power to make rules protecting the reliability of the State’s electric grid during emergencies.

Nick has a deep knowledge of Texas’s unique jurisdictional doctrines and the Texas Constitution. In the Supreme Court of Texas, he has represented a group of State Senators in a Texas constitutional challenge to the State’s most legislative redistricting, Texas’s largest county in a Texas constitutional challenge to a law restricting the manner in which the County administers elections, the Chancellor of the University of Texas in a suit by a member of the Board of Regents accusing the Chancellor of acting ultra vires by denying the regent access to confidential student information, and a business in a certified question from the Fifth Circuit regarding the scope of the Texas Constitution’s prohibition on retroactive laws. In the Fifth Circuit, Nick was responsible for briefing that convinced the court to order a bankruptcy court to abstain on Burford grounds from hearing a debtor’s adversary proceeding, which would have interfered with Texas’s critical electric-regulatory administrative regime.

Nick has argued three times before the Supreme Court of Texas, as well as before numerous Texas courts of appeals. He is a native Texan and a graduate of the University of Texas and Columbia Law School. Before joining ADJ, Nick clerked for Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson, of the Supreme Court of Texas, and Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll, of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico.